


New Life; Cool Life

by Rhonda



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Bittersweet, Canon-Typical Violence, Childhood Trauma, Class Issues, Eye Trauma, Female Pronouns for Grell Sutcliff, Fluff and Angst, Found Family, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Implied Grelliam, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Medical, Minor Character Death, Misgendering, Motherhood, Murder, Running Away, Starting Over, Suggestive Themes, Trans Character, Trans Ciel Phantomhive, Trans Female Character, Transmisogyny, Underage Drinking, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:07:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 44,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25215958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhonda/pseuds/Rhonda
Summary: Ciel's life is miserable and Ciel is miserable being Ciel. Grelle is more than a little sick of being a psychopomp. The young Earl and the Reaper conspire to escape their old lives and start anew in America, making dangerous enemies in the process and maybe, just maybe, learning a little something about themselves along the way.
Relationships: Ciel Phantomhive & Grell Sutcliff
Comments: 31
Kudos: 62





	1. Actually, Fuck This

**Author's Note:**

> I had multiple people request I do something actually serious with [a trans girl Ciel interacting with trans woman Grelle](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25098460) and I said I wasn't going to unless I got an idea and guess what, I got an idea. So by popular demand here it is.
> 
> I think it's the height of conceit to make a playlist for your own fan fiction, but I did it anyway [so check it out for some officially author sanctioned feels.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_y3_6j4Unc&list=PLRa_ugocyEsSKyx53N20OcTqTncEm8RZd&index=2&t=0s)

Sebastian strode into the boy’s bedroom. It was true that they hadn’t any business to attend to but it was highly unseemly for a young lord to spend just so much time in bed. He had already come in twice to wake him and help him get dressed, and twice had the boy pulled the covers over his head and ordered him away. Now, at eleven o'clock he wouldn’t be dismissed so easily.

A third time the boy pulled the covers over his head and grumbled for him to get out. He didn’t feel compelled to do so, so it must have not been an order. Defiantly, he crossed the room over to the curtains and pulled them back letting the late morning sunshine come streaming in.

“Rise and shine, young master. It isn’t proper for a man of your status to lay about in bed all day,” he called, turning to see that the covers had been pulled all the way over the boy’s head. “Come now, really young master, are you truly so afraid to begin the d-,” he stopped himself when he pulled back the sheets to see a bespectacled woman staring back up at him in place of the boy.

“Aww, I’m dreadfully sorry Mr. Sebastian, sir. He told me I ought to lay here and pretend I was him and say that I didn’t want to get out of bed, he did,” said Mey-Rin, fearful of being chastised. Sebastian was surprised but didn’t allow his displeasure at being deceived appear on his face.

Okay, just what was the boy up to today? Where was he? He’d check the whole grounds if he had to. If worse came to worse he could always use the sigil to find the boy. He was vaguely intrigued by the mystery, whenever the boy tried to pull something sneaky on him it was always amusing. The boy had always surprised him.

Just then Sebastian felt a searing pain in the back of his hand, but it wasn’t the physical pain that caused him to double over in shock. The boy. He couldn’t have. He would never be so stupid. He began to shake violently.

“Mr. Sebastian, sir? Are you alright?” The maid asked him with concern, sitting up in the bed. 

“Don’t. Call. Me. That.” The demon screamed, human form fraying around him. A woman’s shriek rattled the estate for a moment before being abruptly cut off.

* * *

William entered the office building on time like he did every day. He exchanged a few nods with some of his coworkers, but for the most part walked through the halls in silence. Sutcliff wasn’t at her desk, but that was hardly out of the ordinary. She was far from a model employee.

Inside his office, sitting squarely on his desk, he found a small object wrapped in a lacy red cloth. He disinterestedly picked it up and unfolded it. Inside was a red pair of spectacles with a gaudy glasses chain dangling from either end. The sight made his heart race, instantly recognizing its meaning. She wouldn’t. She would though. He didn’t want to do what he’d have to do next. But he would.

With sudden shock he realized the red cloth they had been wrapped with was a pair of women’s underwear, her underwear. He looked to see that the door to his office was closed before he slid them into his breast pocket for later. He took the glasses in his hand and walked out of his office to report a desertion.

* * *

“The secret is that men want to make you hate cowards because cowards always win. I never fight fair and I never fight honorably. If the world that John Locke and Adam Smith described into reality is one where survival is dependent on being faster than the next guy, then why would you ever hobble yourself by playing by the rules.

“There’s nothing wrong with being a coward, and there’s nothing wrong with not being a real man. Deals can be broken. There’s nothing magical about blood or ancestry. Avenging your family's honor doesn't matter, because honor isn't real. You don’t need to be Earl Phantomhive. You don’t owe the Queen anything. You don’t need to grow into the man the world wants you to be.”

The words Grelle had said that day echoed in his mind as he sat in the dark corner that they had finally found all to themselves. The room was starkly lit by a spot lamp and he was surrounded by a few small stacks of clean towels that she had stolen from the First Class section. Traveling Steerage Class to better hide their escape had been a shock but he was a tough kid, he could tough his way through this like everything else that had ever happened to him. 

“Are you sure about this?” she said, in the present, “I mean, _really sure_ about this? It’s not too late to back out, you could always tell him you just wanted to take a surprise vacation. Hell, if you reveal yourself to the captain he might even turn around back towards London on your behalf.” She was right too, as she was then. 

Grelle right now looked decidedly unlike the Grelle he had come to know since he had caught her red handed in the Whitechapel Murders. In fact, she looked more like she did when he had first met her. Her hair was dark brown and her face was clear of any makeup, but that was where the similarities ended. Instead of her long ponytail her hair was cut short and lightly oiled to the side, the only point of interest being a prominent coiffed swirl right above her forehead. Instead of her butler garb or flamboyant reaper outfit she was dressed in a dull and dusty men’s suit that, while tailored to her body, made her look unremarkable in a way that he knew she hated. Most glaring was her lack of glasses and the unfocused blank look she gave the room along with the way she’d squint whenever she was forced to focus on anything more than eight inches in front of her face.

“I am sure about this,” Ciel said. He wasn’t. Ciel had never been sure about anything in his life though. Being sure about major life decisions was overrated. Binding himself to a demon was something he had been sure of and look how it had left him, the miserable Earl Phantomhive, the miserable boy lord, the miserable Queen’s Guard Dog, the miserable man seeking miserable pointless revenge on people he didn’t even know. He wasn’t sure of this, and that was what was so appealing about it, because the only other option for him at this point, miserable as he was, was death. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

“Of course, there are other ways he’ll be able to track you, I have some ability to mask your location but things will be difficult. Demons on Bassie’s echelon are not evaded so easily,” she said as she idly sharpened the straight razor, the only blade she’d been able to bring aboard other than her disguised Death Scythe. “He’ll be hunting you for the rest of your life,” she said, “if we get caught I’ll be killed but what will happen to you will be much, much worse.”

“I know all this, it doesn’t change anything.” 

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you, then,” she said as she dipped the blade along with some small scissors into a glass of strong vodka poured from a bottle that she had traded with some Polish emigrants for. “Your aunt actually taught me how to do this,” she said, chuckling to herself. “ _My son now, Angelina,_ ” she whispered as she pulled a chair up to where Ciel was sitting.

“This is going to hurt, a lot,” she said.

“I’ll scream,” Ciel replied coldly, trying to give off an aura of confidence that really wasn’t there.

“No you won't, the last thing we need someone to hear and call the constable,” she said as she produced a small blocky wooden soldier and popped it into his mouth to bite down on. Ciel dimly recognized the irony of him biting down on an original Funtom figurine, the thing was a proper collector’s item, and wondered if Grelle had brought it along explicitly for that irony.

She leaned in close, very close to him so she could properly see what she was doing. “Are you ready,” she asked holding the blade and scissors in front of his face. He nodded but then also started crying and hyperventilating. She pulled back and said: “That doesn’t look like ready,” not unkindly. “Here,” she said, picking up the bottle of vodka and pouring a fresh glass after dumping out the contents of the first, “drink this, it’ll help.”

He spat out the wooden toy and took the glass in his hand. It smelled like chemicals and Grelle had poured the glass almost all the way to the top. He looked at her and she gave him a reassuring face, if with slightly unfocussed eyes. He drank the whole thing in one go and it burned his throat a lot more than he was expecting. He wanted to wretch. Luckily, Grelle had anticipated this and already given him a glass of cold milk to gingerly sip at. She wasn’t such a bad butler when she tried, not that that was the nature of their relationship now or would ever be the nature of any relationship for him again. He hated the thought of people waiting on him hand and foot, it just reminded Ciel of Him and the life that he was leaving behind.

He nervously rubbed at the fabric of his dress. Grelle had picked it out. It was simple and unassuming but pretty in its own right and the smooth burgundy cotton rolling between his fingertips calmed him down. Just being in a dress calmed him down. It was his decision to disguise himself as a girl just as it was Grelle’s idea to pull out her old male butler look for this. Everyone knew he loudly protested crossdressing as a disguise so no one would suspect he’d be dressed as a girl now that he was running away on his own. And that was the only reason.

They sat there in a gentle silence for a few minutes as he slowly sipped at the milk and before he knew it the alcohol kicked in. He had drunk a glass or two of wine before, but this was a whole other ball game. He felt good, but also like the world was moving in slow motion. His hands and feet tingled and the texture of his dress under his palms felt even better than before. He dimly recognized Grelle moving back over to sit next to him.

“Are you ready now? The flush in your cheeks says so.”

“As I’ll ever be- Wait! Does the flush in my cheeks make me look pretty?” he asked, swaying slightly back and forth. Probably just from the roll of the ocean beneath the ship. Probably.

“Very pretty, Ciel. Now hold very still,” Grelle said leaning in again, gripping his hair as though she didn’t trust him to do so before popping the toy soldier back into his mouth and using her long fingers to pull back his eyelids. She tenderly lined up the scissors with the corner of his eye.

The pregnant moment before she incised him finally ended as she gently slipped the end of the scissors into the edge of his eye socket. It didn't hurt as bad as he was expecting at first. It wasn’t until she started to dig it in further that it became one of the worst pains that Ciel had ever felt, second only to when the sigil had first been placed on that very same eye. All Ciel could think about was the realization that Grelle was giggling before he passed out.


	2. Brim With No Yankee

The kid had thankfully tuckered himself out pretty quickly and Grelle was able to complete the enucleation without much interruption. The sea was fairly gentle and by the time she severed the optical nerve and sutured the wound she’d managed to save a good portion of orbital fat. If the kid wanted to get a glass eye and ditch the eyepatch look when they made it to America he’d be able to. She inserted an appropriate conformer and cleaned up his face, bandaging it with gauze.

She tenderly picked him up out of the chair to lay him down on the nearby large steamer trunk that held all of their combined earthly possessions, tucking a folded towel under his head as a pillow. She had brought it with them to the dark corner both because it contained what she needed and because in Steerage one could never be too careful leaving one's luggage all alone. It contained thousands of Pound Sterling Notes that they needed to fund their escape and new lives and, if discovered, would surely give them away.

He was still out, probably for the best with how much she knew it would ache for the next few days. He looked really peaceful laying there like that. In the dress with his soft calm face no one could mistake him for a boy. He had grown out his steely black hair in the previous months as he had talked to her about his feelings, he said having longer hair made him less miserable, and she really hoped it did.

The eyeball still glowed faintly where Grelle had set it on a nearby serving tray to dispose of later. She took the salt she had gathered and cleared some floorspace to work in. She kept referring back to the notes Othello had written for her on how this disenchanting ritual worked. Weirdly, she had memorized the entirety of the enucleation procedure the first time she had learned it, but this simple ritual was nonsense to her. The thought of never seeing the geek again made her a little sad, but not that sad. She’d left a little gift for each of her friends and she hoped he’d gotten a kick out of it. They’d all be together again in the end, besides.

The salt circle she made was okay, maybe a little oblong but it would still serve. Placing the eyeball in the center she read out the incantation and performed the somatic gestures.

It must have worked because the faint glow emanating from the thing faded and the flesh rapidly mortified. She put on a glove and picked it up between her thumb and forefinger. She didn’t really have a plan for what she’d do with it so she left the room to go toss it out a porthole. She wasn’t gone long and Ciel was right where she left him.

After cleaning up and disposing of all the evidence that they had ever been there, she sat with Ciel as he lay there on the trunk. She watched his breath slowly roll in and out. He wasn’t dreaming which was a good thing, he’d confided in her that he hadn’t had anything but nightmares since he was a little boy. He was still such a little thing, but she wasn’t sure if he was a boy anymore. He didn’t deserve all the pain and misery that he’d been through. She was afraid there’d be a whole lot more before the end, but at least Ciel would be free. She tousled the kid’s hair.

She didn’t really have much else going on other than endlessly trying to bother William into falling for her without much success. Grelle had selfishly hoped that maybe Ciel might chicken out early in and she could return to dispatch after having deserted for only a few weeks or months. Will would begrudgingly clear her name and reinstate her. Perhaps tearfully admit how much he had missed her and how deeply he wanted her all this time and how her being gone was what it had taken for him to realize. But as it stood she was in it with Ciel for the long haul. It feels like it was only a short while ago that she would have killed the brat without a second thought, but now she felt like she’d do anything for him. He did have that effect on people it seemed. Their time talking to each other had changed a lot in both of them, it felt like.

He woke up groggily, probably still more than a little drunk. She gave him some water but before he could drink it he vomited. Grelle was quick with a bucket and she held his hair back.

“It hurts,” was all he managed to get out before being taken by another vomiting spell.

“I know kiddo, I know,” she said as she rubbed his shoulders.

* * *

The conditions of Steerage were quite frankly inhumane. Grelle had been working class in life and as such held no illusions as to the inherent specialness of people of high birth. Still, it was much harder on Ciel for having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Grelle couldn’t help but feel for the kid, despite his entitlement. He didn’t complain very much, and for the most part spent the week or so they were to be at sea in his cot trying to recover from the surgery. But she could still see the look in his eye when she brought him a bowl of the garbage that passed for food in this dreary place. 

She wanted to see him happy, as far as she knew he never smiled. The closest she’d ever seen him to smiling was when she’d shown him the dress for his disguise that she’d bought for him. She wasn’t sure if it was because it was a physical representation of his freedom or something else. Probably something else, but that was something he’d need to figure out on his own. She’d help him where she could but ultimately the emotional journey before him was a trail that he'd have to blaze himself and it would be much harder than the physical one, even if right now it didn’t seem like it.

He reminded Grelle of so much of herself when she was a kid his age, but more angry and less effeminate. Grelle had the luxury of always having been a girly kid so she knew what her place in the world was from the moment she could express her feelings. Every person she had ever known made certain she knew exactly what the place in the world was for women like her. Ciel had so much else going on, that even getting to this point of recognizing his own misery and taking action to alleviate it was further than she thought he’d get before having his soul swallowed by that wretched butler of his. She’d be lying if she said he hadn’t become a bit of a project for her. She wanted to find out where this story ended.

At the moment their story was dark, as dark as the Steerage hold was. But maybe with a little water and sunshine it might grow brighter. There were no flowers growing down here yet. There was hope though, all of the emigrants crammed into the hold would talk excitedly about the new world they were going to. New fresh lives in a land full of opportunities that one merely needed to reach out and grasp to receive. Grelle didn’t believe the United States was the land of opportunity that everyone said it was and she was certain that most of their shipmates would be hurt and disappointed by the kinds of lives they lived once they arrived. Still, she hoped Ciel might be able to see some of himself in their plights and dreams, perhaps he would if he ever got out of his cot.

For the most part their cramped little section of the Steerage was filled with modest non-English speaking families. They were all sweet but most importantly they kept to themselves. Occasionally the German couple would argue with each other, often late into the night, but the deck was already so noisy and crowded anyway it hardly mattered to her and Ciel slept fitfully regardless.

There was one man, a Scotsman traveling alone, probably in his late twenties from how his voice sounded, who bunked towards the end of the row and gave Grelle pause. He’d pass by them multiple times per day, lingering to look at them a little too long. She imagined he took her for an easy mark, a spindly effeminate nearsighted young man alone with a pretty daughter. Grelle couldn’t make out what exactly the man was looking at; whether he was eyeing up their large expensive looking steamer trunk, a rare sight amongst the deck where many passengers had little more than the clothes on their backs, or Ciel.

She wouldn’t wait to find out. At night she tailed the man outside to the aft privy. She had the decency to let him finish before walking up behind him as he exited. She grabbed him by the hair, pulled his head back and opened his throat with her straight razor. She chose to not use her lovely Death Scythe for fear of the noise drawing attention to her. She spun him around roughly and held his head and neck over the railing to let his life's blood spill into the sea, so as not to leave any stains on the deck. The night was pretty and still, the moon and stars reflecting off of the slowly rolling Atlantic. To her it was just fuzz, but she figured it wasn’t a bad last sight to see, better than a dingy East End flat that was for sure. Oh, but she was always such a romantic. It hadn't been too long since she last killed someone, but she had still forgotten what a rush it was.

Eventually the fight drained out of him and the noises he made stopped. The once mighty pumps of blood slowed to a light trickle, she pulled him in and let him slump against the railing while she wiped the blood off of her razor onto the man’s coat.

She heard footsteps and didn’t have time to run or throw the body overboard. She couldn’t see who it was, but he had light hair and was holding some kind of long pointed tool in his hands. He stopped not when he spotted the body, but when he spotted her. She felt like an idiot for not realizing this would have been a possibility. She hoped this wasn’t someone who knew her.

“Oh eh, you’re a reaper ain’t you? What are you doing here?” he said in what Grelle thought was a Bostonian accent. Definitely American, so at the very least he wouldn’t recognize her by sight. All dispatches would be notified of a deserter matching her description but there was no way that information would have been able to reach him out here in the middle of the ocean. More than anything he'd be suspicious of her lack of glasses.

“Retired, my good man,” she lied, “my time is long over, but I miss it alright. Came here to watch how you boys are doing it now-a-days, maybe give you a few pointers.” She couldn’t see his face but judging by the fact that he hadn’t already attacked her, he had bought it well enough. He walked over to the corpse and pulled out a little book from his breast pocket while poking the end of his weed puller into the body.

“Did you see who killed him?” he asked, casually looking over the man’s Cinematic Record.

“I hardly think that matters, hopefully they’re still making it clear that we’re not detectives in the Academy.”

“Sorry sir, I’m always curious. I mean who doesn’t love a good whodunit?”

“I think he’s hiding over there,” she said pointing behind where the reaper had come from. It was the oldest trick in the book but it still worked. The Yankee reaper made the fatal mistake of turning his back on Grelle to look where she pointed. As she ran her Death Scythe up along his spine she wondered if she ought to feel bad for doing this. She didn’t, but she felt like she should.

Looking at the Cinematic Record spill out of his body, she hoped the noise of the engines drowned out the sound of her Death Scythe this close to the aft of the ship, but she wasn’t confident about that. She didn’t have time to weigh the bodies down like she had wanted to and instead just hauled them overboard and hoped no one on any other decks were looking too closely at the ocean’s surface beneath them.

She had managed to avoid getting blood on her suit but the deck and railing looked like a real horror show. She left the crime scene and returned to their cots where Ciel tossed and turned in his sleep. She pet gently at his head and sat down on their steamer trunk pulling out the to-die book she lifted off the reaper along with his Death Scythe now safely stashed away, always a useful thing to have. There’d be an investigation, both human and reaper. The human one might be amusing, but once they reached their destination and an American reaper didn’t report back, there would be a thorough inquisition. 

Hell, it might even give London dispatch suspicion to think Grelle might have fled to America. If anyone found the bodies floating in the Atlantic and viewed their Cinematic Records they would find out that it was exactly her who killed them both. Dispatch didn’t like to admit it, but hunting down deserters was a low priority with all the overtime most offices were already swamped with, that is unless said deserter is suspected to have committed fratricide. By killing the Yank she had effectively just guaranteed that her apprehension would be a number one priority. She felt kinda shitty for having jeopardized their plans so quickly. 

She decided she wouldn’t tell Ciel, not wanting to worry him any more than he already was. Poor kid was a ticking time bomb of anxiety and stress. She rubbed his hair again, and the motion seemed to help with his nightmares. She idley flipped through the to-die book. There was an old woman who would die of a fever before they arrived but other than her and the man that Grelle murdered there wasn’t anyone else. Grelle figured she’d do the right thing and visit that woman when the time comes, it was the least she could do.

The next morning the whole ship was buzzing with the news of a Bostonian second class passenger’s disappearance and apparent murder. Ciel didn’t ask but she figured he knew, he was a smart kid. Obviously there was nothing that could tie her or anyone else to the disappearance and bloodstain, but security was still tighter and movement was restricted especially for those below decks. 

It had been several days and no one had even reported the Scotsman missing. She didn’t feel that was very fair at all and decided to rectify that. The sailors didn’t particularly care about the loss of the man himself besides the implication that there may be a serial killer loose on the ship. 

The last few days of their voyage had been under a very strict curfew and even though Ciel was more active, both from a speedy recovery and from becoming used to life in Steerage class, he wasn’t able to go very far or do very much. Grelle did eventually reap that old woman as she lay dying, using the Yank’s scythe so as not to cause as much of a scene. She had lived a very long and full life. While reviewing it, Grelle couldn’t help but hope she could see Ciel have one as long and fulfilling as hers.

In her first act of making new positive memories for the kid she snuck him above decks to see the Manhattan skyline take shape. It was tricky but with all the sailors busy making final preparations for the end of their journey, she managed to find a small spot they could be alone and look out to the West to see the city appear over the horizon. With her unfortunate nearsightedness she couldn’t make out much more than a smooth blur. Ciel got excited and pointed when he saw it, lightly bouncing on his heels acting very much like the little kid he was.

There were cold Atlantic winds and it was a shock for Ciel to be outside after having spent over a week indoors in the muggy stagnant air of the Steerage. She took off her coat and wrapped it around the kid’s shoulders. Anyone who’d look at them would think they were the very image of father and daughter.


	3. I See You

Grelle slipped the customs inspector a hundred pound note to keep him from asking too many questions about why two poor immigrants had a trunk full of cash. The cash was the only thing in the trunk that mattered. There were a few spare changes of clothes and medical tools that Grelle had put inside a fairly generic shaving kit. Grelle had warned Ciel against packing mementos, any sentimental object that had emotional resonance with his home could be used to track them by anyone with the arcane know-how. His family’s ring and Madam Red’s coat were both still in England along with all of their other possessions. 

The Funtom wooden soldier had been an intentional joke she later admitted, but it had been thrown overboard as well when the surgery was complete. Even something as simple as that could be a beacon to the right person and it just so happened that he had spent the entirety of his life since the fire associating with many right persons.

Grelle had been at the very least able to bring her garish Death Scythe, its supernatural nature making it immune to the same kind of tracking. Ciel was mixed as to whether he was resentful or not. There was a part of him that wished he could bring something with him, but so much more of him wanted as little to do with the life he was leaving behind as possible. 

In a small consolation Grelle had told him he’d be able to have new things that he could get attached to. He would make new memories with new objects. He was looking forward to the idea of a glass eye, which Grelle had suggested might be a possibility, that matched the eye on his left. His eyepatch made him feel tough in a way he realized he didn’t like. Besides, it was just another thing that might give him away.

However, the first new sentimental item he’d end up receiving would be a young girl’s parasol Grelle gave him after the custom’s inspector moved on to the next party's luggage.

She reached into the trunk and seemingly produced it out of nowhere. He had no idea where she had gotten it from, probably stolen from First Class as she had done with some of the supplies they used for the procedure and occasionally a snack or two when the gruel of Steerage was too horrid for him to keep down. He held it in his hands while she beamed down at him. It was new, mostly unadorned, and it matched his dress well. He appreciated that Grelle realized his general distaste for frilly things, and had a genuinely tasteful eye when picking out his clothes. They all looked really pretty on him. If he were a girl he could wear clothes like this all the time. He looked up at her smiling face and thanked her for the gift. She just tousled his hair like she’d taken to doing ever since they’d started growing closer.

They docked in Manhattan. Ciel was excited to finally hit the city streets and be out of that awful boat, but Grelle informed him that as Steerage class emigrants they’d be ferried to Ellis Island for processing. Ciel wanted to scream but instead steeled himself for another round of being treated like cattle. At the very least being off of the ocean liner was a relief and they could finally stand out on the deck again and look out at the city.

Ciel wanted to unfurl his new parasol to keep some of the sun from burning his pale skin but Grelle advised him against it because of the high winds. The last thing he wanted to do was lose his umbrella as soon as he got it. Instead she just lent him her coat again. It was a nice look, small silver earrings, dark grey oversized man’s coat draped across the shoulders, neat burgundy dress, both hands resting on a salmon parasol as though it were a walking stick, neck length steely black hair flowing in the wind at least partially covering his bandages.

Grelle on the other hand was handsome and it looked like she hated every second of it. Dark Grey vest over white dress shirt, black bowtie, dark grey trousers, black leather shoes with heels that were just under tall enough for them to be out of the ordinary, short gelled dark brown hair stiff in the breeze. She looked out at the horizon at nothing in particular. The journey had been rough but now being here, seeing the city, Ciel could hardly contain his excitement. Grelle seemed much more somber, though not to an uncharacteristic degree, and every time she’d realize he was looking at her she’d turn and offer a shark toothed grin and make some kind of off-color joke. 

Ciel pointed out the Statue of Liberty, finally able to see it being out of the belly of the ocean liner. Grelle asked him to describe it to her. It was a massive dull brown neoclassical hunk of copper but Ciel didn’t really have the words to describe how it actually made him feel, so he stuck with a very literal description. Grelle just scoffed and said that she “sounded like a hussy,” and went on to offer suggestions as to better subjects for a hundred and fifty foot tall statue, some of them bawdy but all of them made Ciel want to laugh. He didn’t know why he still couldn’t, even here so far from his troubles. He worried it might be possible he wouldn’t ever be able to again.

They were given identification tags as they made it down the gangplank, and were told to leave their luggage in the baggage room while they were processed. Ciel had the strange feeling he was being watched as they climbed up the stairs into to the building, a feeling which was confirmed almost immediately when he looked back to see a row of men with clipboards monitoring them. “Doctors,” whispered Grelle. Ciel wasn’t sure if that actually made being watched by them any better.

At the top of the stairs they were separated into different lines by gender. Ciel was worried, but Grelle gently rubbed reassuringly at his shoulder. He felt a little abandoned, it was the first time he’d been away from the woman in over a week and now he was in a strange place surrounded by strange people all alone. It didn’t make him any less anxious when he realized he was on his way to medical examinations. He watched as a doctor dispassionately checked a woman’s hair, face, neck, and hands before ushering her along. Occasionally he would mark on her clothes with a piece of chalk and someone would pull her aside and out of the room. 

The waiting was agony, but eventually Ciel made it to the front of the line and with butterflies in his tummy he stepped forward for the six second physical. As used to being touched as Grelle had made him, this was way different and it felt awful.

_He was in a cage and he was pulled out of a cage. Hands roughly grabbed at his arms, touched his face, probed at his body like it was theirs. He felt a sharp pain on his earlobes and hot pain on his back._

His eye ached, and before he knew it he was back on Ellis Island finishing the medical exam. The man lifted Ciel’s hair and frowned. He wrote “Ct” in chalk on Grelle’s coat, which he was still wearing, and moved him along in the direction Ciel desperately didn’t want to go. 

Ciel was brought to a small room and made to wait an amount of time that he had no Earthly way of gauging. He was more nervous than before and ran his hand up and down the fabric of the folded parasol laying across his lap. He had no way of knowing what was in store for him and that made it all the worse. He closed his eye and tried to not have any memories, he couldn’t afford something like what had just happened hitting him again, but being man-handled and trapped alone in a small room wasn’t doing him any favors.

More than anything he was afraid of his true gender being discovered, the thought was as embarrassing as it was a death sentence. Grelle had taught Ciel how to tuck and he had taken to the practice long before he actually needed to. Even when he was dressed as a boy he had felt it comforting. But if the doctor found a reason to have him remove his undergarments then he’d be found out in an instant. He hated the idea of them finding out he was a boy intrinsically just as much as he hated it because it would lead to him being detained.

Eventually a tired looking overweight doctor with small wire frame glasses came in, glancing at the mark on Grelle’s coat then at Ciel’s bandaged eye.

“Do you speak English?” He asked.

“Yes,” Ciel replied. He seemed surprised by Ciel’s posh accent, but looked too relieved and exhausted and rushed to question it.

“Why don’t you tell me in your own words what happened to your eye then, young lady.”

“It was a life saving surgery,” Ciel said, trying to keep his voice steady. It was the truth and it looked like the man was reluctant to probe any further. His job was to check for potential epidemics and in front of him was just a physically injured kid. Ciel hoped he’d let him go. After a tense moment he did.

* * *

Back in the main room Ciel saw Grelle and she gazed unfocused in his direction when he called out her name, unable to see him until he sprinted up to her. He didn’t realize he was sprinting until he had barrelled straight into her. Before he knew what he was doing he was hugging her tight, face pressed into her chest as he dry sobbed. Grelle graciously accepted the embrace and reassuringly pet at the back of his head. Thankfully this kind of display was hardly out of the ordinary in a place like this, and the people around them paid them no mind at all.

He didn’t know why but the medical inspection had felt like one of the tougher things he’d had to do in his life. He’d gone soft. If this had happened even a few months ago Ciel wouldn’t have batted an eye, he’d have bottled it up like a proper little high class boy should. But now, whenever he was around Grelle, Ciel wasn’t Lord Phantomhive or the Queen’s Guard Dog, he was just a little kid. He felt like just the little kid that he was and right now he had felt scared and lonely and he reached out for comfort where he knew he wouldn’t be pushed away.

As Ciel calmed down Grelle led him into a queue for the legal processing. Ciel told her about his experience in hushed tones and she responded sympathetically, like he knew she would. Their talk eventually devolved into more mundane chatter about their plans once they made it to Manhattan. It further devolved into Grelle complaining about bureaucracy and trying to make Ciel laugh like she always did. It made him feel better, even if he still wasn’t able to join in. They eventually made it to the front of the line and a rather plain looking man sat behind a kiosk ready to take their details.

“What is your manifest number?” he asked. Grelle gave it to him, along with Ciel’s and he looked relieved. “Oh thank god, you speak English,” he said, flipping through the ship’s manifest. “Ugh, looks you were on the page that those idiot sailors lost.” Of course it was Grelle who had spilled water on that page of the ship’s manifest before they arrived so as to better hide their papertrail. “Let’s at least get started with your names then.”

“My name is Jackson Whitechapel, my good sir.” Grelle said. Ciel looked at her stunned, barely able to contain a scream.

“And your daughter?” he asked. Thankfully, the man didn’t look up from his paperwork to see the expression on Ciel’s face.

“Celia, Celia… Whitechapel,” Ciel said, shaking himself out of the daze and trying to not let his indignation seep into his voice. Grelle answered more of the questionnaire, and Ciel just stood there in silence. She said she was a barber-surgeon and widower, that they had come to America after Ciel’s mother had died, all very sad but believable. 

“Listen, we’re supposed to keep you kooks here until we can find some way to verify your identities, but between you and me I can tell you’re just an honest man and his daughter fallen on hard times,” he said. 

“Oh thank you so very much for your leniency, sir. My daughter and I won't forget your kindness.” Grelle thanked him profusely. He made a few stamps on some papers that he gave Grelle which she folded up and placed in her breast pocket before heading back out of the building.

“Jackson Whitechapel! You can’t have been serious? Why did you leave clues to your identity in your fake name? Why didn’t you just say your name was Iamb Jhack Theripper?” Ciel whispered angrily as they walked up the gangplank onto the ferry that would take them back to the mainland, luggage in tow. Grelle just smiled.

“I don’t know, I thought it was kind of a cute name. Yours was super cute too, and besides you picked out a fake name that was almost identical to your real one. Seems like a double standard to me,” she casually whispered back.

“Y- you really think it’s cute?” Ciel asked, a brief respite in his rancorous mood before it returned. “Well, I thought it would be most natural to choose a name similar to my own so that I would respond to it easily. If I chose something else, someone might read my face and see that I don’t respond as quickly to it,” he said. It was half true. The real reason he had chosen that name was because, having left behind so much, at this point the name Ciel was the only thing he still had left of his family. It was a name that his parents had chosen. He couldn’t just give it up, not wholly anyway.

“You really think that people notice that sort of thing? Not everyone is as thoughtful as you, Ciel. Most people are far too self absorbed to ever notice little tells like that,” she said. “Maybe we should get you into some poker games, really double our funds,” she joked. Ciel was still upset but he supposed there were a lot of other things he needed to worry about.

* * *

New York was in many ways like London. First of all it stunk to high heavens. The streets were dirty and covered in feces from both human and animal alike. The well-to-do rode by in carriages while the lower classes trudged from their dingy apartments to their low paying factory jobs. The architecture was different, it was distinctly American. In London and the surrounding area it wouldn’t be uncommon to pass buildings that were three or four centuries old, some even older still, and the more contemporary architecture was designed to complement those styles. Here everything was modern and the newest buildings stuck out like a sore thumb as though they existed to put the past to shame. 

Everything was faster here, people walked faster. Little kids playing in the street ran after one another. Old men on leisure strolls strode by like they were late for appointments. Everyone here was pushing for the next big innovation, billboards advertised the electric tea kettle, barkers on the street showed off clothes with zippers, men crowded around pharmacy windows looking at the latest Star Brand Safety Razors. Grelle tisked at the sight, expressing faux-worry that maybe her chosen fake profession might be obsolete within the coming years.

Their first stop was the currency exchange. Grelle had already exchanged a small amount during Ciel’s medical examination, but they needed to get the thousands of pounds they had stashed away converted into something usable. Now that they were out of Steerage the two of them could pass as any class and they didn’t draw any stares walking into the ornate Neoclassical building. Ciel stuck close to Grelle through the crowds. She had given him ten dollars and her blessing to go explore the city a little, but he really didn’t feel like being out of her sight, still shaken from their separation on Ellis Island.

The wait was boring and dull and eventually he started watching the crowd around them to kill time. There was a mother holding hands with an impatient daughter of about his same age. They were English too, he could tell by the sound of their accents drifting through the din. The kid was restless and the mother assuaged her by kissing her on the forehead and telling her they’d stop for ice cream on their way home. Ciel looked up at Grelle, whose eyes were as unfocused on the world around them as always. From this distance he was the only thing she could see and her eyes snapped into focus when she noticed him looking at her. 

“When we’re finished here would it be alright if we could stop for ice cream?” he asked, feeling like a little kid the moments the words left his mouth. She grinned down at him and he immediately regretted saying anything.

“Of course, anything for my lovely daughter,” she said, he blushed at the word daughter, probably from embarrassment and nothing else. “You know I really don’t spoil you enough,” she said in her usual sing-song jovial voice before an ounce of seriousness crept in, “and I am genuinely proud of you for having made it through the voyage here. You really do deserve a reward.” As if to punctuate the thought she leaned down and kissed him on the forehead. He blushed even harder and looked away. 

They managed to exchange their money without much trouble and took to the New York Streets to find an ice cream parlour. They were already in one of the nicer parts of town, and after Grelle asked a few locals they found themselves sitting on the curb enjoying a frosty treat. Ciel had gotten himself some pistachio ice cream which he ate out of a small paper bowl, something about the green color had drawn his eyes, while Grelle picked at a scoop of vanilla bean. 

While the wind off of the Atlantic had been sheer, now in the city it was hot and muggy. The ice cream really helped cool Ciel down along with the parasol Grelle had given him. They watched the city bustle by in silence, occasionally broken by Grelle criticising some woman’s fashion choices or making some obscene remark about a man she found attractive. He knew she couldn’t see them but for vague blobs and her comments were so generic they hardly even applied to the people she was supposedly talking about. He figured she was just going through the motions, trying to bring a little bit of normalcy to their life. Ciel would just hum an acknowledgement, not really paying attention, mind focused on unpacking the day. He was safe now, here with Grelle, and at least for the time being there weren't any immediate threats. Although he didn’t know if he would ever be truly safe ever again. He’d need to spend the entire rest of his life looking over his shoulder. But at least now he had the chance of not being miserable. Sitting here in the warm late afternoon sun enjoying ice cream with his m- with Grelle, he wasn’t miserable.

He looked at a news boy a few years younger than him in a battered old cabby hat selling the Sunday Edition of the Times. He was curious so he got up and crossed the street to purchase one. It wasn’t until he was on the other side that he realized he had left Grelle. He looked back and saw her still sitting where he left her, picking at her now long melted vanilla ice cream. She looked out blankly towards where he went but he knew she couldn’t see him. More than anything he was worried about the thought of troubling her, so he fished out a nickel and gave it to the newsie, before running back to her.

He didn’t see the carriage that almost hit him until it flew in front of his face at breakneck speeds. He fell over backwards scraping his hands on the pavement. If he’d have been a second too early he would have been seriously injured or killed. Grelle hadn’t jumped up to dash him out of the way like Sebastian would have. In fact she was still sitting there, expression as blank as ever. He could have been killed and she wouldn’t have even noticed. He was overtaken with a bitterness that he quickly pushed away. It wasn’t her fault, she wasn’t his butler. He wasn’t invulnerable like he used to be and he’d need to realize that. Now he was just a mundane kid who needed to look after himself. He felt very small all of a sudden.

She frowned when he came into view, seeing the cuts on his palms that had formed when he caught himself. She rushed into the parlor behind them and came out with a glass of water and clean washcloth which she used to gently dab at the wounds. He didn’t realize he was crying at first, but he was. She lightly dabbed at his cheeks too and the cool washcloth on his hot face made some of the raw emotions subside. 

The near miss made him think of Madam Red. She had been injured in a carriage accident. She’d often say that she’d died that day in her private moments, and he thought in a lot of ways it was true. The moment she lost the ability to have children her life ended. She said he was like a son to her, but he’d never truly felt a great deal of warmth from the woman and in fact she’d been quite distant for the most part. Now the person who had killed her rubbed at his face and hands with a washcloth. Grelle couldn’t have kids of her own either and had conspired with Angelina to punish those who forsook that gift. Ciel wondered if he’d have done the same were he in either of their shoes. He didn’t want to be a dad, but he figured he might just be too young to know what the desire to have children felt like.

She sat back down on the curb next to him after she took the glass back in and left a generous tip for the use of their washcloth. He leaned into her, resting his head gently on her shoulder, as if to let her know it was okay that she hadn’t rushed to his rescue. She just patted him gently on the back. He unfurled the newspaper and skimmed through it.

He flipped through the pages, searching for something. He wasn’t used to not being front page news and it wasn’t until the last few pages that he found what he was looking for. It was only a paragraph long. Grelle read it over his shoulder.

> **Still No Clues In Disappearance of English Child-Earl**
> 
> Scotland Yard is still investigating the apparent kidnapping of the young Earl Ciel Phantomhive, heir to the Funtom Toy Co. The boy’s vanishing coincided with the disappearance of his butler and the grizzly murder of the estate’s maid. The three surviving members of the staff were released from questioning this Friday after being cleared of suspicion according to sources within The Yard. As of now the official suspect is the butler, Sebastian Michaelis. Other theories are based on sources that tell us the Phantomhive household has always had connections to London’s criminal underground. This reporter must wonder, if the English can’t keep their young entrepreneurs safe how can they ever hope to beat out American industry abroad?

Ciel’s heart plummeted. Mey-Rin. The clumsy far-sighted maid who would always bring him warm milk and would blush whenever Sebastian would catch her while dropping precious tea sets. He killed her. Ciel had killed her by running away. He didn’t even think that this could have been a possibility, he wondered how many other lives might have been ruined by his selfishness.

“Oh Ciel…” Grelle said at the look on his face when he turned to her desperate for any kind of wisdom.

“But…” he said, searching for the words that never came. “Sebastian was always so kind to the staff,” he said, resigning himself to the statement even though it hardly captured the tempest of thoughts in his head.

“The thing is a demon,” Grelle began leaning in close to better look Ciel in the eye. “A demon is avarice made carnate. A demon puts on ethos the way that an orchid mantis puts on the guise of a flower. It may look pretty but that’s just a form it evolved to attract and distract prey. It didn’t choose that, it didn’t think it into existence, it simply is what it is that benefits it most.

“Demons fundamentally lack empathy, and I don’t mean that in the sense that they’re remorseless or evil or malicious. I mean that in the sense that they really can not see people other than themselves. They don’t _see_ us, Ciel. They’re solipsists. That’s what’s so uniquely troubling about them, they aren’t evil. They can’t be malicious, not truly anyway. Sadistic? Maybe. Cruel? Definitely. But they act without regard for others wholly and completely, incapable of mercy or sentimentality. They can neither love nor hate,” she finished, Ciel didn’t understand exactly what she was getting at and she clearly saw that in his face.

“But haven’t you killed people?” was all that he could think to ask in response before adding: “Didn’t you say that things like honor and duty were bullshit? Aren’t those just extensions of mercy and sentimentality?” 

“Ciel when did I ever say I wasn’t a demon?” she replied. Ciel could think of quite a few times she had said or implied she wasn’t one. “I meant that rhetorically,” she continued before he could respond, “I honestly don’t condemn them in any way. Again, they’re just an organism in the cosmic ecosystem just doing what they do.

“So yeah, I have low empathy and I act for my own best interest, but not wholly. I mean you’re here today aren’t you?” She sighed, “I wasn’t born this way, you know. There was a time that I was pure, so full of love and hope and excitement for the world. But I kissed boys and wore pretty dresses and was beaten down over and over again for it until I grew bitter and jaded and hateful. Until I did the most selfish thing I could think to do.” She paused for a moment to collect her thoughts, the memories clearly being more than a little too painful for her before continuing: “This world makes us begin to resemble demons, Ciel. I know there was a time when you were pure too.

“I think there’s a way for me to get back to that place. I don’t know how. But I think that if I believe I can hard enough it will just _be_ true. A universe where that couldn’t be true simply mustn't exist. I will prove it.

  
“And I know that you can get there too, Ciel. That’s why I’m here, because when I look at you, I _see_ you. I empathize with you in ways I thought I couldn’t anymore. When I look at you I feel pure again. And I know that if I can get there that it’s possible for anyone to get there. And more than anything I will do everything in my power to help _you_ get there.”


	4. Doublethink

It was eleven o’clock when Celia finally gave up on trying to sleep in. Another fitful night. He had hoped that his time away from Europe would alleviate his insomnia and night terrors but it hadn’t. It had been a little over three weeks since they’d arrived in the States and he felt like his nightmares were getting worse and more vivid. Now when he woke up he would actually remember bits and pieces, instead of just vague unease and fear.

There was a raven, there was a cage, he was in a cage. There were fuschia eyes, too many of them. There were gnashing teeth, but not enough. Celia didn’t need to be a soothsayer to interpret these dreams, he just wanted them to stop. He didn’t want to spend any more time lingering on them than he was already made to.

He lay there staring up at the ceiling, and gently guided his thoughts somewhere else. He thought about what Grelle had said to him at the end of their first day in America, about wanting to purify him. He didn’t have the stomach to tell her but it had made him a tad uncomfortable. It wasn’t the content of her words exactly, he actually appreciated that she believed in him so fully and he really wanted to grow and heal with her too.

It was that it reminded him of the fallen angel. Of the words they had used to describe him, but there was something different to it. There was a hopefulness to what Grelle said. A belief that the world was an inherently good place. He was flattered that he caused her to see that even if he couldn’t see it himself. At least not yet. The angel had been so pessimistic. Didn’t think that humanity was worth saving as it was. Something about their worldview had been so much worse than anything they had done to Celia directly. He wondered if it wasn’t the source of his nightmares as much as anything else.

He got up and took off his nightgown. Grelle had bought him women’s pajamas and he begrudgingly accepted them for the sake of maintaining his persona. His bedroom was still small and mostly undecorated. Hopefully over his time in their small Brooklyn apartment as he grew to live in this place instead of just survive here, he’d find some meaningful furniture and knick knacks to hand adorn his space. As it stood the only interesting thing in his room was the window that looked out on a busy thoroughfare five stories down.

He went to the small adjoining washroom to brush his teeth and hair. Celia’s hair was getting longer and as it got longer it required more and more maintenance. He still wasn’t used to grooming himself and he felt like he spent way longer working out the tangles than he should have. 

Next up he took the glass of water containing the small rich blue glass eye that they had purchased at a specialty shop downtown. It still felt unnatural putting the thing in, but he figured he’d get used to it. Another thing he still wasn’t used to was his eyes being the same color. His reflection looked younger and smaller than it ever had, it reminded him of how he looked before this all began. The swelling and bruising from the surgery was mostly gone and his face was the very image of a pretty young girl. He worried about what might happen to that face should his latent puberty finally kick into high gear. Grelle said she had ways of reducing testosterone and that she could show him but he wasn’t really sure how committed he was to this. There would eventually be a point where he’d start living as a man again, right? Definitely.

Grelle had shown him some of the basics of makeup and he felt like he was starting to get the hang of it. He took some of the face powder to lighten his already well defined pallor. He really didn’t need it, except for the dark bags under his eyes, but putting it on helped him feel safer regardless. He also dabbed gently at his cheeks with some blush. Perhaps a little bit too much, but Grelle had said he looked pretty when he blushed and he endeavored to chase that look as far he could. She had even shown him how to apply fake eyelashes but he was too self conscious about drawing attention to his eyes, so he left them fairly unadorned. Instead he finished off the look with a light coating of pink lip gloss.

He appraised the look in the mirror, rubbing his lips together to make sure the gloss was evenly distributed. He thought he looked very pretty. There were a lot of things about his face that he liked and now that he was free of the sigil he found himself capable of looking into his reflection for extended periods of time. As he looked he noticed the side of his mouth twitching. He leaned in to get a better look at it, could it be a side effect of the enucleation? Had Grelle hit a nerve ending in his face when she removed the cursed eyeball? No, it was on his left side. It kept twitching up almost into what could be described as a smirk. Or a smile. 

Celia left the washroom to get dressed. Getting dressed on his own had also been something he was wholly inexperienced at, and required help with at first. Now he managed to pick out a fitting pair of dark goldenrod tights and brass studded earrings that matched his favorite burgundy dress and black kitten heels. He popped quickly back into the washroom just to admire how nicely the outfit complemented his makeup, steely black hair, and pretty blue eyes. He felt giddy, but he worried that his giddiness wouldn’t cut through his sleep deprivation forever.

Thankfully Grelle had a pot of coffee still warm on the stove. She was leaning back in her chair holding the latest issue of Vogue within half a foot of her face so she could read it. It was a new magazine which she’d recently become addicted to since moving here. She’d even purchased a subscription for herself when she got the one for the New-York Times that Celia had asked her for. The daily newspaper in question sat frumpled on the dining table in the center of the room.

“Any updates on England?” Celia asked as he entered the room.

“You know Ciel, you’re doing an awful job of letting go if the first thing you do every day is check for any updates on your past life,” Grelle said, setting the magazine down on the table and moving to pour Celia a cup of coffee. She served it to him like she did every day, with milk to cool it down and two more sugar cubes than Celia wanted. Celia really preferred tea but Grelle was a coffee drinker, and he felt like he’d need to learn to like coffee if he was going to make America his new home.

He sat down at the table and sipped at the mug, thankfully cooled by the milk to how he liked it. Celia never took any sugar in his tea, but the bitterness of the coffee demanded some. To his dismay Grelle always went overboard. When he’d tell her it was too sweet she’d just respond by saying he was too sweet and that she wanted to serve him a drink that matched who he was. He wasn’t sure if it was actually a goof or just a cover for how she had so much trouble seeing how many cubes she was grabbing with the tongs.

“Well, there wasn’t a whole lot directly to do with your disappearance,” Grelle said, as she tied on an apron before she turned towards the stove to prepare them some lunch, or breakfast in Celia’s case. “However,” she continued, apprehensive, looking back towards Celia, the fact that it was bad news clearly readable in her expression.

“What is it?”

“Well, Funtom has been turned over to the board of directors in your absence, and they’ve voted to dissolve the company,” she said, turning back to her cooking. It hit Celia like a gut punch. There were so many things about his past life that he wasn’t proud of, things he deeply hated and filled him with remorse. But Funtom wasn’t one of them. Funtom brought joy to children’s lives. Nothing had ever brought him closer to happiness than watching a little girl beg her mother for a Funtom doll, or seeing little boys eagerly plan their strategies for a Funtom board game in hushed whispers. This was the worst possible news he could have gotten. Grelle couldn’t see Celia, but she could still sense that it had devastated him.

“Ciel, there'll be-” she started before he cut her off.

“Why do you still call me that?” he asked with an anger that he knew she didn’t deserve. 

“What do you mean?” she replied. If she had been annoyed at being interrupted she didn’t show it.

“Why do you always call me Ciel? My name is Celia now.”

“I call you Celia when we’re around other people. Would you prefer I call you Celia when we’re alone as well?” Grelle asked, a certain capriciousness seeping into her voice. Celia paused.

“Yes.”

“Should I read into that?” she said, turning her head enough to look toward him out of the corner of her eye.

“It’s only because I want to practice living as my false identity better,” he said defensively. She just hummed a response. Where did she get off asking questions like that of him? His face felt hot. Now he was embarrassed on top of mourning the death of Funtom. But there would still be toys in the world just as there would still be guard dogs, as he’d found out.

After learning about Mey-Rin’s death he’d become despondent and overwhelmed with anxieties about how everyone in England’s lives might be ruined by his escape. But after watching headlines keep from devolving into chaos and horror over the last few weeks some of the anxiety left him.

The Queen had a new guard dog now, and there were other men investigating the cult’s activities. It was almost as though the thought that he had to heft the weight of the realm’s safety on his shoulders all on his own was the foolish notion of a preadolescent boy.

Celia was content now to just sit here, sipping his coffee glancing over the mundane daily news, looking out the windows of their apartment onto the busy streets of Brooklyn, smelling the smoke coming from Grelle’s stove top. Grelle’s cooking could be passable on good days, but the days when it wasn’t its quality fell fast. He usually took the safe bet with a bowl of cereal but since he had woken up so late in the day he hardly felt breakfast food was appropriate. Besides, it looked like Grelle had been really excited so he had caved and decided to see where she was going with it. Now he wasn’t so sure.

“Grelle, what are you cooking over there and why do I feel the need to gather my few Earthly possessions to prepare for egress in the event of a fire?”

“It’s…” she said, scooping something off of her cast iron skillet and putting it on two seperate plates before spinning around and presenting him with: “Grelled Cheese Sandwiches!... Ta-da!” She slid a plate in front of him before sitting down on the opposite side of the table. 

“How is a Grelled Cheese Sandwich different from a grilled cheese sandwich?” he asked. It looked like it had been charred to a crisp but still somehow the cheese inside wasn’t melted.

“Well, Celia, _Grelled_ Cheese Sandwiches are made with one special secret ingredient: love!” she said, taking a bite. She immediately wretched. “Okay, maybe I didn’t add enough love,” she said after she hacked up bits of the sandwich into a napkin. She touched the tip of her chin with her pointer finger while looking up and to the side. “Perhaps we should go out for lunch today.”

“Perhaps.”

* * *

It was a hot day, and Celia brought the parasol with them. He loved the feel of it in his hands. He liked to twirl it, it had a weightyness to it that wasn’t immediately apparent. He also had a small purse with him where he kept some extra makeup in case he needed to refresh. He was pretty sure he’d find some other more masculine stuff to put the purse later but until then this would do.

The diner that Grelle picked out was a few blocks from their apartment, and it was nice having an excuse to go out for a stroll. Celia had been nervous being outside, it made him feel exposed, but being cooped up inside watching the world go by from their windows wasn’t any better. Besides he felt safer with Grelle. There were a few times he had gone out on his own since arriving here but every time ended with him hyperventilating and dashing back inside. Grelle spent most of her time inside with him, she said eventually she’d need to start working but until that day she wanted to always be available to Celia if he needed her.

They got seated in a comfy booth and were given menus. The places Grelle took them were nothing like the restaurants Celia was used to. They weren’t grimy or dirty or poor quality, but they were decidedly nothing like the high class white glove restaurants that he’d attended as Earl Phantomhive. He thought he liked these places better, they were noisier and the wait staff wasn’t desperately trying to blend into the wallpaper. Grelle joked with their waitress and she brought them a seltzer for her and a Cola for him.

The sweetness of this dark drink didn’t bother him as much. It was a fun novelty and it hadn’t worn off on him yet. The bubbles tickled his tongue and there was such a strange mix of flavors that he really couldn’t pin down. It made him feel funny, not the same way that the vodka had, quite the opposite in fact. It brought the world into tighter focus and he felt like he wasn’t afraid of anything anymore. The drink was just another artifact of American life that he felt exemplified the paradigm shift here. There was nothing proper about it, it was a brazen sweet indulgence that would never have been allowed in the grave decorum of upper class Victorian life.

Grelle sipped at her seltzer and stared out the window at nothing in particular. She had grown very fond of sparkling water since arriving here and she ordered it every time they went out. They both shared a love of bubbly drinks it seemed. They ordered their lunch, both of them in the mood for sandwiches. They sat in a comfortable silence before Celia broke it. 

“How _did_ you know you were a woman? I mean, it must have been hard with the whole world telling you you weren’t one,” he said, feeling emboldened by the soda. He wanted to ask her more about some of the stuff with her gender, you know, to better understand her and no other reason.

“Ah,” she started being pulled from her reverie and turning towards Celia. This far across the table she couldn’t see him properly. “Well, for me it was easy, I realized I wanted to be a girl pretty early on. That’s fairly uncommon though, from what I’ve heard from other women like me. You’d be surprised how many women like me were in the Dispatch, or maybe you wouldn’t, knowing how the world treats us.” She sighed and looked away before continuing, “There are lots of women who go their whole lives without figuring it out, or rather they figure it out on some level but don’t let themselves accept it as true. They live in states at which they simultaneously accept it and deny it as a truth about themselves. It’s a concept I invented called _doublethink_.”

“Huh,” Celia said, pondering her words. She looked towards him with a knowing shark toothed smile and Ciel just turned away to the window.

“But to more directly answer your question, I grew up in a small farming village far outside of Newcastle upon Tyne. I was expected early on te ‘elp wit’ t’ ‘arvest,” she said, slipping casually into a thick Geordie accent. It took Celia aback, there was no way to him that Grelle was anything other than a native Londoner until now, and even if she couldn’t see him she sensed the shocked expression on his face. “Surprised? I’m flattered. I’m glad I could do such a good job hiding it the whole time, more than anything I wanted to forget that awful place, have no one ever suspect I was from there.

“But yeah, there were a lot of masculine expectations for me growing up, not unlike yourself, but more physical and grueling. With high class kids like you you’re at least allowed to play with toys and dress in pretty clothes, I had no such luck. Although I suppose it helped me realize I was different far quicker. When you’re punished severely for displaying any femininity at all it’s a lot easier to realize what it is that femininity means to you. 

“Anyway, I left that place when I was still young, actually right around when I was your age as a matter of fact, and I made my way to London where the rest is history.” She left out the important detail of how she had become a reaper, but that was a part of the story Celia really didn’t want to hear. “In conclusion, I’d say I knew I wanted to be a girl a very long time, it just took me until a little while after dying that I realized wanting to be a girl was a symptom of being a girl. From then on I dressed however I wanted and acted however I wanted, grew my hair out and wore makeup like I wanted. I knew I was a girl and if people didn’t realize that then that was on them, I thought. But despite all my posturing it still stung when people mistook me for a boy,” she finished. Celia thought about what she said, it made sense to him in a lot of ways. Could people really doublethink themselves out of believing they were their real gender like that? Celia really liked it when people mistook him for a girl and by extension could understand what it might feel like to be mistaken for a boy as a girl.

“Is it alright that you’re disguised as a man?” he asked suddenly, realizing the possibility that the way Grelle was dressed could be causing her discomfort. She leaned back in the booth and thought about the question for a few moments before answering.

“No, I hate it,” she said matter of factly. “But, not so much that it isn’t worth it, for you, kiddo.” 

Just then their food arrived. Grelle shifted topics to something inane and unrelated while they ate, clearly not wanting to talk about anything serious anymore. Celia indulged her, feeling a great bit of affection for the older woman. Celia had always seen smalltalk as another one of the menial degrading tasks of a proper posh gentleman but when it was with Grelle it wasn’t so bad.

* * *

They finished off their sandwiches and Grelle left the money on the table. The day was hot and the early afternoon sun shone down between the buildings offering little shade. She took Celia’s arm in hers as a proper father would and began to lead them down the busy thoroughfare back home. She hoped it could be a home, at the very least.

As they turned the corner to the block their apartment was on Celia grabbed her hand and tugged at her to get her to stop. Blind as she was she couldn’t see whatever it was the kid had been looking at, but it clearly distressed him a great deal. She leaned down and asked what it was so he could whisper it to her.

“Men, on our apartment building. They’re in black suits and have gardening tools,” he said quietly. Grelle grabbed him by the hand and started leading him away. She wanted to burst out into a sprint but she was more than certain that all the sideroads would be watched. Instead she walked with a casual if brisk pace, formulating a plan of action in her mind, but in the meantime taking them away. She glanced back at Celia who looked scared and confused, then at the off-pink parasol she’d given him, held in his right hand and resting on his shoulder. She didn’t want to take back her gift but she would if she had to.

Grelle felt like the idiot that she truly was. She had left her Death Scythe in the apartment. She had never gone anywhere without it before they moved here, but the last few weeks she’d felt so cozy and safe living her little domestic fantasy with her d- with Celia that she’d started absentmindedly leaving it around instead of carrying it on her person at all times like she always had done. They had just been walking a few blocks, damn it. Not only was it gone now, it was evidence, proof that they had been here. They couldn’t go back to that apartment. Surely it would be watched around the clock if she’d been identified as a reaper-killer. Everything they had would need to be abandoned. All of their savings. All of the clothes she had bought Celia.

This was all her fault, why couldn’t she have just left that man very well alone? Or taken a more diplomatic approach to the Yankee reaper. William always said she was impulsive, but they were really in it now. They’d have to skip town. She didn’t want to leave New York, she felt like it reminded Celia of his home. Grelle worried that Rural America would remind her of _her_ home in a way she really wasn’t looking forward to.

The streets were crowded but Grelle felt very alone. She had come up with a plan but it would require leaving Celia by himself for a while which she really didn’t want to do. She wasn’t worried about the kid’s immediate danger, the reapers were after her and had absolutely no interest in a child who broke a Faustian contract. Instead she looked at how worried and scared the kid looked and hated the idea of putting him through any more stress. But it had to be done if she wanted to retrieve her Death Scythe and more importantly Celia’s cash. As it stood she had about thirty dollars in her wallet, far more than most carried around as pocket change but still not nearly enough to start a life on.

She stopped into the first pawnbroker they passed by and bought the first revolver she saw. The man behind the counter said it was a Thirty Two Iver-Johnson, she didn’t know what that meant but paid him the five dollars all the same plus a little extra for a box of bullets. Celia looked hungrily at the gun, not inexperienced with firearms. Grelle on the other hand had never touched one until that very moment. She held it between her thumb and forefinger like it was a snake that she wasn’t sure was dead or not, handing it off to Celia the moment they left the view of the shop windows. Grelle didn’t know the first thing about guns but she imagined it was improper for a man to hand a gun to his adolescent daughter in polite company.

Celia eagerly took it and loaded it a lot quicker than Grelle would have thought possible, spinning the cylinder before flicking it into place with his wrist. He looked pretty badass and Grelle kind of regretted not buying him a gun sooner, but she also was anxious about bringing that kind of violence from his past life into his present one. At the very least it seemed like the gun made him feel better. He looked a little less fearful holding the gun and he eagerly looked up at her wanting to know what she was thinking.

“I’m going to need to borrow your parasol,” she said first. Celia looked confused but acquiesced, now clutching a new comfort item in his hands. She took the rest of her money out of her wallet and handed it to him. “You’re going to hire a coach to the Central Railroad Terminal in Jersey City, and you will wait for me there, okay. You’ll need to take a ferry across the Hudson, there should be more than enough money to get you there. Figure out when the last train of the night departs and if I’m not there by that time I want you on it, wherever it’s headed.”

Celia nodded and put on a brave face, before his lip began quivering and he hugged Grelle tight, sobbing into her coat shoulder. She shushed him and pet at the back of his head. He looked up at her and said a tearful goodbye before running off to find a carriage to take him across town.

The steady rhythmic little clicking of Celia’s kitten heels on the pavement was her only indication that he still existed after he left her immediate range of view. Eventually that noise too faded and was superseded by the noises of the city.

She quickly jumped up the wall grabbing onto a window planter to heave her lithe form all the way to the roof. The roofs here weren’t as steep as those in London, something that she’d be endlessly thankful to the Americans for. Especially since she had to navigate the London skyline with her heels. This would have been a piece of cake, if only she could actually see where the next roof she was jumping to began. 

Grelle wasn’t so sure that she’d be able to take _any_ reapers in a fair fight let alone several at once. She hoped the parasol would be a last resort. Instead she planned to approach the building from the opposite side and shimmy along the outside wall to enter through the window. Before she could do so she’d need to be sure there weren’t any reapers on the roof to see her approach. It took some doing but she eventually managed to get into a position on the building across the street where she could see a couple of black smudges pacing around on the roof. 

She was laying on her belly, looking through a small hole in the low brick lip of the roof for what had to be several hours. Normally she hardly had the kind of patience for something like this, but there was so much on the line that she took the boredom like a champ. One of the smudges definitely didn’t, though, and eventually hopped away leaving the other all alone. She assumed they had been bored, but it was also possible they were going to get the both of them some stakeout food in which case it meant she’d need to act soon. With only one reaper on the roof it was only a matter of guessing which side of the building they weren't looking at and hoping to get lucky. She really didn’t want to have to kill anyone and bring even more heat down on her or Celia.

She stood on a two inch ledge next to the open window that she was pretty sure led into their kitchen and she listened to try and find out if anyone was still inside. She stood there what she thought might have been ten or so minutes before she was sure there was no one there. She slipped through the window and patted herself on the back for a perfectly quiet three point landing.

She picked up the Vogue she’d left on the dining table. Might as well right? She wasn’t even half way through it when they left for lunch. Now onto her room where she had kept the cash. It looked like most of the room had been searched through, like she feared, but perhaps they hadn’t found the money. She was reaching under the mattress to no avail when she heard someone step through the threshold to the door. She was unable to throw the parasol into their face with her arms stuck like this and when he spoke up she was glad she hadn’t. Not immediately anyway.

“Jackson Whitechapel? Are you truly so incapable of competence on any level Sutcliff?” She knew that voice the instant it began speaking. She wasn’t sure if her compromising position shoulder deep in the mattress was more or less the worse for it.

“Oh, come on! It’s a good name!” she said as she pulled her hands out from under the bed and stood up, thankfully he didn’t use the opportunity to attack her. She couldn’t make out the form of William T. Spears from all the way across the room but she was sure it was him. He cut a fine silhouette even as a vague blob. He was blocking her only exit, if she didn’t want to try somersaulting through a tiny closed window down five stories to land on pavement.

“Looking for your garish nonregulation Death Scythe, Grelle?” he asked, voice as unreadable as ever.

“As a matter of fact I wasn’t, William, if you’d believe that?”

“Good thing, I suppose. The New England Dispatch already took it. I was hoping they might hand it over to me so I could melt it down into a paperweight, but they’ve been more than a little unwilling to cooperate interdepartmentally.”

“Oh but you’re always so cruel to me. Even now, in my time of need, my sweet handsome Will.”

“You probably can’t even see me right now.”

“But I remember!” she said, swooning onto the bed, before writhing around in a manner she hoped was seductive but probably just came across as a fish’s last gasps before asphyxiating on the deck of a ship, “Fancy one last roll in the hay William? One last tryst before you take me in or kill me or whatever it is you’re here to do?”

“Looking like that, I’m afraid not.”

“No fun as always then,” she pouted, sitting up. “You wouldn’t happen to know where the money under this mattress has gone would you?”

“I don’t know about the money, no. These Yankees have some really morally dubious reapers running collections. They put you to shame. I imagine they’ve taken it and plan on blowing it on carnal human pleasures,” he said with disgust.

“Alright, so if you wont make love to me and you can’t help me get our money, can you get out of the way so I can get back to my daughter?” Grelle asked. He made a small noise of curiosity when she said daughter. It was a slip of the tongue and Grelle worried that correcting herself would just incriminate her further. Instead she just continued, “You never made it clear whether or not you planned to arrest me or kill me or what.”

“Well that depends Sutcliff,” he said, voice betraying a certain tiredness, that hadn’t been there before, “Did you murder Nathanial Melville?” 

“Who?”

“A blond reaper who was killed on the ocean liner that you took here. He was apparently quite popular. The New England Dispatch is out for blood, it was all I could do to convince them to only post two reapers on this stake out.”

“So you do care, William!” Grelle said, swooning all over again.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Well, Will of course I… of course I… I...” She’d never had trouble lying to Will before, so why was she now? Every time her mouth tried to form the words her thoughts just drifted to what she had said that day in Manhattan after Celia had read that his little gun-toting maid had died. William meant something to her, and she had to admit it. She couldn’t lie to a man she loved, not after everything that had happened, not after all the work she’d put in to getting better. She looked up at him from her spot on the bed, “Please don’t make me say it, William.”

He made a disappointed grunt, and pulled out his Death Scythe.

“Please Will. This kid, Ciel. He… She. She’s like me, William. But she still has a chance, a chance to live a long and meaningful life. You don’t know what she’s been through William, things that no child should ever have to endure. Things that make my skin crawl, things I wish I could forget her ever telling me. As a way out she chose to feed her soul to that awful beast. This is her only chance, Will. _I’m_ her only chance. What was the point of any of this if not to learn why life can’t be so easily given up on. If you bear any love for me or the time we’ve known each other you’ll see in my eyes how much this means to me. How important this really is,” Grelle begged. It was a moment before she realized she was crying and another moment before she heard Will sigh, his blob slumping against the doorframe.

“Just say it and I’ll let you go. Just prove to me you’ve really changed like you think you have.”

“Yes, William, I killed him. I ran my scythe along his spine. He didn’t stand a chance, William. I stabbed him in the back and he didn’t have so much as a moment to scream before his life left him. Then I threw his body in the Atlantic Ocean, along with the other man.”

“Other man? Oh Grelle, why do you have to make my life so hard like this? Even now that your misfiled paperwork doesn’t plague my inbox you’re still a thorn in my side. Go on, get the fuck out of here, I’ll go distract the lunkheads on the roof,” he said. She got up off the bed and walked past him, pausing to take one last look at him, finally able to see him up close. He was as handsome and stoic as ever, she wondered if he’d noticed she’d modeled her hairstyle after him. She leaned in to give him a kiss and he didn’t pull away, instead turning his head so it landed on his cleanly shaven cheek. He smelled faintly of his aftershave and she lingered just a little to breath it in.

“We’ll meet again in the end, you know. I believe that now,” she whispered before pulling away and walking into the kitchen towards the open window. She heard a noise behind her that she had never heard before in her entire time knowing the man. William was laughing. 

“Grelle Sutcliff really thinks she’s going to Heaven,” was all he said as he chuckled. “Listen, I was only going to give you this if you didn’t do it, but what the hell, you’ve earned it,” he said, throwing her a small white cloth package tied up in string.

She caught it with a little trouble and pulled the string unfurling it. Inside was a tiny pair of pruning scissors. She looked up at the man who was now laughing hard, harder than Grelle had ever seen anyone laugh. When she realized the tiny Death Scythe had been wrapped in a white pair of cottony boxers he doubled over. She was worried the Reapers on the roof might hear him laughing and investigate. She put the scissors and the undies into her pockets before waiting for the man to regain his composure. 

“Oh Sutcliff, you are just too much,” he said, his fuzzy form moving as though he was wiping tears from his eye. “Oh, I almost forgot, there was one other thing,” he said in between fits of giggles, _“_ The kid’s demon, it isn’t in England anymore. I did my best to track its location. You know me, never sits right when there’s a demon loose in my jurisdiction. As far as I know he came here to America. Can’t wait to see these Yankee clowns deal with that, eh?”

She leapt out the window, not waiting for the distraction William had promised her. If the reapers on the roof noticed her they didn’t pursue. She had left Celia alone. What the fuck was she thinking, how could she fuck up so many times in one day. She ran as fast as she could along the rooftops. It was roughly eight miles from here to The New Jersey Central Railway Terminal. Even sprinting as fast as she could, it would still take her thirty minutes before she’d even make it to the ferry ride across the river, and that was assuming she wasn’t waylaid or held up in any way. 

She jumped down to the streets and looked around. She saw what she thought was a municipal police officer riding by on a horse, a few feet away. He looked towards her as she sprinted up to him. Before he could say anything she stabbed him hard in the leg with her Pruning Scissors, dimly realizing that William hadn’t even given her both of them. She used it as a lever to yank the man down to the ground and her up onto her new steed. The horse was spooked at first, confused as to what was going on. She tried to invoke everything she knew from her upbringing as a farm boy to try and calm it down, which must have worked since she wasn’t bucked off immediately. 

They galloped down the street, the police officer screaming in pain and shock on the ground, Cinematic Record streaming out of the wound on his leg. She used the late afternoon sun to guide her west, as though she might turn back the clock by chasing after it. Worst case scenarios kept playing through her head. Things that were too terrible not to have already certainly happened. She kept galloping across the Brooklyn Bridge and lower Manhattan, hoping the horse at the very least could see where they were going. She did her best to weave through the traffic, but as blind as she was she kept having near misses.

When she got to the Hudson river she didn’t really know what to do next, so she dove in and began swimming across it. She felt kind of like a tool trying to swim the dirty river in her full suit like that but she didn’t really have much of a choice. She didn’t know the first thing about piloting watercraft and figured this was just faster than trying to learn. 

Exhausted, she pulled herself out on the other side before a large brick building, several people gawking at her but many too busy to stop and watch the crazy man climb out of the Hudson.

“Grelle!” she heard a small child’s voice call out. What the hell would Celia be doing here of all places. She saw her little girl run up to her, thankfully unharmed. She seemed to go in for a hug before thinking better of it, with how soaked through Grelle was. Yeah, her leather shoes were definitely ruined.

“Celia,” she panted, “What are you doing here? I told you to go to the New Jersey Central Railway Terminal.”

“What do you mean, Grelle? This is the Central Railway Terminal,” she said. Grelle looked around her, she couldn’t really see any defining characteristics about where she was but she assumed the kid was telling the truth.

“Well why don’t we go in and purchase a ticket then,” she said. Celia’s face fell.

“I’m guessing that means it didn’t go well,” she said somberly. That was one way of putting it mildly. Grelle briefly considered keeping it from her, to protect her, before she decided that she deserved to know. She’d even tell her about her fuck up on the boat, she wouldn’t keep anything from the kid anymore.

“The Demon is here, in America,” she said. Celia didn’t react at first, like she was processing it. She was such a tough kid, Grelle wished she didn’t have to be.

“Okay,” was all she said as they entered the Terminal.

Grelle made a bit of a scene tracking water into the building but before they knew it they were onboard a sleeper train to Columbus, Ohio. Grelle spent a couple hours debriefing Celia on everything that had happened and everything she hadn’t told her before her wet clothes became too uncomfortable and she excused herself to the washroom to try and clean up and dry off. Celia had taken it in stride, as she was wont to do. Grelle took longer than she had intended and by the time she exited Celia had tuckered herself out. 

Despite her sleeping in she was still tired. Grelle understood it was a big day, and Celia couldn’t possibly be sleeping well, regardless. The girl would often wake Grelle up with her screaming, to which Grelle would go in her room and sit on the side of her bed gently petting at her head until she managed to get through whatever particularly horrible part of her nightmare she was going through.

Now though, she looked fairly peaceful, Grelle picked her up and laid her down on one of the bunks in their cabin. It was a much more comfortable sleeping surface than a steamer trunk, a steamer trunk that was long since left behind in New York. She tousled at the kids head thinking about what she’d do next. The Vogue had been ruined in the river but at the very least this train stocked some other fashion magazines that she could flip through.

“Mommy,” Celia mumbled in her sleep leaning into Grelle’s touch.

_Yeah, mommy’s here, kiddo._


	5. Things That I Want

“I’m pretty sure the fastest ways to make money involve already having money,” Celia said over breakfast. They had arrived in Columbus, Ohio and spent the last of their money on some coffee and a pair of German meat pastries. They sat in the midst of the moderately busy train terminal’s cafe section discussing how to restore their recently relinquished funds.

“Well, for obvious reasons we can’t do any of those things. If only I had thought to grab my barber-surgeon tools I could at least get a few bucks offering a shave or gallbladder removal,” Grelle said, as she rubbed her smooth chin. Even with her razor gone she managed to get a fairly clean shave with the edge of the tiny Death Scythe William had given her. However, Celia doubted that screamed the kind of professionalism the discerning gentleman, with money to burn on paying someone to do something he could do himself for free, would look for in a barber.

Celia kicked his feet under his tall cafe chair, he felt like a clueless little kid since all the ideas he had seemed fantastical and required investment. He looked at the empty little plates that once held kraut bierocks sitting between them. He’d hungrily eaten his own within a minute, having barely had any supper the night before. Grelle had taken a few nibbles of her own but eagerly offered the rest of hers to Celia. He felt weird accepting it but she insisted saying that he was “a growing girl.” He appreciated her commitment to their cover story but the way she had said it lacked the same kind of ooey gooey facetiousness that it had previously. Either way, he ate hers too although much more daintily than the first. He’d never really known what it was like to be hungry and now facing down the idea of poverty he really didn’t want to find out.

He pushed around the crumbs on the plate with his small pastry fork. It was a habit that Sebastian had always readily chided him for for its impropriety, but Grelle didn’t care or even seem to notice. Just another reason that he preferred her. But now the demon was here in America, or at least that dower no-nonsense reaper had supposedly believed so. Was it just a random chance that he had managed to follow them here? Had he just picked the first English-speaking nation on an alphabetical list, or was there some other way he could be tracking him? Celia felt like he had done a very good job of letting go of his past, he had no possessions that tied him to it, and even mutilated himself to remove parts of his body that symbolized that time in his life. That time in his life where he didn’t believe he deserved to be happy. 

“What about a bakery?” Celia said, getting inspiration from the crumbs. “We could start a bakery in town and make bread and cakes and pastries and other fun treats.” It had been one of his fantasies of domestic normalcy since the fire, being just a middle class kid whose living parents owned a bakery. He had always had a taste for exotic and expensive cakes and treats and often thought he would have the ability to reverse engineer the ones that Sebastian had served him. When he was little he’d sneak into the kitchen and steal cookies as they cooled. Or, was that Ciel? He couldn’t remember. Did the boy who snuck into the kitchen do so because he was bold or because he was timid? Whichever boy that was was gone now, replaced by Ciel and then replaced again by Celia.

There were a few times since then that he even found himself in the servant’s corredors hand hovering just above the door handle to the kitchen, but he’d never grasped it, turning away back to his drawing room to instead further his work.

“Bakeries are businesses and businesses require capital,” Grelle explained, not unkindly. “You need to buy ovens and you need to buy wheat, you need a storefront to sell your baked goods in, you need pots and pans and yeast. Also Celia, I mean this with all my love and affection for you, but you’ve never worked a day in your life. Do you know the first thing about baking? Because I don’t.”

“Then I could get my first job in a Bakery! I could knead dough and learn how to make bierocks from the German immigrants or tea cakes from the Irish.” Celia said. Grelle seemed to ponder that thought for a moment.

“I think it might be good for you, if we could find some honest trustworthy folk. I’d rather not leave you alone for half the day every day. But that wouldn’t help with our immediate troubles and I’d really rather not stay in this town too long if we can avoid it,” Grelle said, and then at Celia’s inquisitive look added, “I want to head further West to California. I heard it’s Summer every day there and that all the men are lean and tan and handsome.” Celia was sure there had to be another reason but he didn’t want to press her on it. She’d been more open with him about her movements but he still felt there were a few things she was hiding. Like Celia’s parasol for one. Just what was it, and why was it important enough that Grelle would bring it with her on her mission to recover their money?

Celia let the silence hang as they both tried to brainstorm other ideas. There was one other that Celia had that he desperately wanted to try but wouldn’t work for the same reasons as the bakery. He’d wanted it since he was a kid and it was even a dream he’d been able to live out, but its execution had felt hollow and empty and hadn’t fulfilled him while he was overwhelmingly obsessed with revenge and duty and certain that he deserved to be miserable forever. Now that he actually wanted to be happy he felt like it was a dream worth trying again and he’d allow himself the small fantasy. He’d float it by Grelle even though he knew it would be shot down if only for the sake of putting the idea out into the universe, to hopefully make it a tiny bit more real.

“What about a toy store?” Celia asked, with an air of nonchalance he felt Grelle could see right though. She just looked at him with a big smile and love filled half lidded eyes that made him blush underneath his makeup and look away.

“I’d like that, I think,” she replied, “but it’s going to be awhile before we can start on a project like that.” She sighed. “A while, and a few thousand miles of heartache, I’m afraid,” she added sadly, before trying to move the conversation and the mood forward by saying: “Any other ideas? Nothing is too crazy or wild.”

“Well, we could always rob a bank,” Celia said as a joke, horror slowly dawning within him as he saw Grelle’s face light up at the notion.

* * *

The Statehouse was across the street and Celia worried that the thought of stealing right out from under the government’s nose was what clinched the plan for Grelle.

It wasn’t so much of a robbery as it was a burglary. As much as Grelle had waxed poetic about ‘waltzing right up to the teller booth, stabbing the pig in the eye, smashing the glass, and taking the cash’ she really wouldn’t be able to win a fight on her own as blind as she was, supernatural abilities be damned. And while Celia was a good shot he’d never actually been too confident in his skills in a firefight.

Besides, while they had a pair of scissors to cut through anything, it was simply opportunity cost to not take advantage of them.

They had spent the day staking out the place and more so enjoying the well maintained park grounds of the Statehouse. Grelle had stolen some food for them from a deli that was a few blocks away and they munched on some cured meats and bread rolls while Celia watched busy people bustle in and out of the bank.

Now it was night and they were in the alleyway behind it. Celia would have liked more time and more resources to plan the heist but as it stood they were flying blind and improvising. It was a heavy looking brick wall that they found out was reinforced by rebar but the Death Scythe sliced through it like it was pruning a rosebush. She gently slid the circular cut out of brick through to the other side with it clattering to the ground like the pile of bricks that it was. It wasn’t that loud outside of the building but the noise still caused Grelle to tense up and inhale sharply. Celia put his hand to the revolver in his purse instinctively at the sound, his other hand clutching the parasol. He held onto his two comfort items rubbing their respective handles with his thumbs.

The night was still and if any authorities were on their way neither of them could hear them. The other side was some kind of storage closet full of cleaning supplies. Grelle gingerly stepped through and after verifying it was safe offered out her hand to help Celia through as well. It was dark but it hardly made things worse for Grelle who was already used to navigating without the use of her eyes. Celia on the other hand didn’t let go of Grelle’s hand and instead just had her guide him through the door to the closet and into the hallways. She walked quicker than he would have liked, briskly paced footfalls dimly echoing his own louder, almost clumsy ones. She either had an idea where she was going else she was just very lucky because they found themselves in front of what he could dimly make out as a large rectangular vault door.

Grelle wasted no time in feeling up the thing for weak points. She first went for the hinges before pausing to think better of it and returning ponder to the lock. She pressed her ear to the thing and gently rapt at it listening for something, for what Celia had no idea. He just stood back and nervously scanned the dark building.

Celia’s heart leapt into his throat when he saw a faint light painting the shape of the halls in subdued color. “Grelle,” he hissed, instinctively pulling out his revolver and pointing it down the hall towards the brightening light. Grelle had her pruners deep in the center of the vault’s lock when she turned to see what he saw. She couldn’t make out the shapes but Celia knew that she could still see that something was coming.

“Hey, who’s there?” the man called out. He was a thick necked security guard of at least six feet. His face was flushed red and his tie was loose around his neck. In one hand he held a lantern and in the other he held a revolver not very much unlike Celia’s own. He noticed Celia and then the gun in Celia’s hand. He shouted and raised his revolver.

Without thinking Celia lined up the sights of the revolver to the man’s center of mass. Celia crooked his finger and pulled on the trigger and there was a gunshot. Grelle was standing between them, shoulders slumped, lightly whimpering. Celia’s gun was on the ground. He dimly realized that Grelle had knocked it out of his hands. There was another gunshot and Grelle spun her body throwing her pruning scissors behind her with all her weight. Celia heard a man scream and he watched Grelle run away from where Celia was standing frozen in shock. Grelle screamed too.

**“How dare you shoot at my daughter!”**

Celia looked up to see Grelle straddling the man on the floor. In the dim light he might have mistaken them for a couple mid-coitus. There were two guns on the floor along with a lamp that pointed off at nothing and was casting harsh shadows with its reflected light. Grelle’s shadow etched into the wall looked much larger than her and its movements were exaggerated like a caricature. It was all Celia could look at, eye unable to take in the true image of Grelle cutting the man.

The way the man begged for his life as Grelle eviscerated him made Celia wish he could move for how desperately he wished to cover his ears. In a kind of cruel irony it did get drowned out by Grelle’s shouting. She was malicious, he couldn’t process exactly what the words were other than that they were malicious. Sadistic? Yes. Cruel? Definitely. ‘What a way to die’ he thought as his body loosened up and he could move again. 

He walked to her, putting his hand on her shoulder. The man was long dead, but Grelle was clearly too overwhelmed to notice that. Celia saw that she had been shot, right in the shoulder, just below where his hand was resting. When she slowed and stood and apologized he saw another bullet wound in her lower tummy, this one didn’t have an exit wound on the back. She moved like she hadn’t been injured, either because of pride or to keep Celia from worrying or because as a supernatural being she simply wasn’t as affected as someone else might have been. Celia couldn’t say.

She twisted her Death Scythe into the bolt mechanism a couple times and the vault door swung open.

Celia left the gun on the ground, and didn’t pick it up coming out of the vault either, bags filled with cash heaved over their shoulders.

On their way out Celia impulsively looked at the man’s lacerated body. It almost didn’t look like a person and he didn’t know if that made it better or worse.

* * *

This early into the night it wasn’t hard for them to get a room at a hotel. Grelle had a few basic glamours that helped hide her bloodied form from prying eyes. Now she was in the bathroom tending to her wounds, Celia could hear her mutters as she worked drift through the open door. The bullet that hit her shoulder went clean through but she was still carrying the one in her lower tummy. She was debating with herself whether or not she’d need to try and dig it out. 

Celia sat on one of the beds hugging his knees and looking across the room at his reflection in the mirror set into the doors of an armoire.

Who was that girl looking back at him. That wasn’t him, was it? It couldn’t be him as much as it couldn’t be Ciel staring back at him. But who was he, other than Celia now?

Who had been that man that Grelle killed so passionately?

Why had he frozen up? Why was he unable to watch her kill him?

He’d watched Sebastian kill before. Kill men that he had given the direct order to kill. Men that Sebastian had killed in much more gruesome ways. But Sebastian had always had that bemused look on his face. A wry smile on his lips, nothing behind his red eyes. This wasn’t different, albeit more passionate, and sloppy. Perhaps that was it, there was an aesthetic distance to the way Sebastian killed. He did it the same way he poured a cup of tea or made the bed, so much so that watching him kill a man invoked the same feelings in Celia as watching his servants go about their chores. Grelle was too... human. 

But still thinking back on all those deaths that Sebastian had brought about didn’t do nothing. In fact, Celia thinking about the deaths that he caused, the people he’d ordered dead by the demon’s hands, made him feel worse. Much worse. He’d never felt this way ever before thinking back on the deaths he was responsible for, it had always been the same numbness as everything else.

Maybe if he was the person that he was now it would have bothered him as much then. 

Was he getting weak? 

He _was_ getting weak. 

Was that a bad thing?

  
  
  


No. 

Being weak wasn’t a bad thing. Not anymore, anyway. Not to him. Not to Grelle. Being strong was what he believed he had to be in order to grow into the man that he thought he had to be. The man that the world wanted him to be. The man Grelle told him he didn’t need to be.

Who was that girl staring back at him? Celia stood up in front of the armoire and decided he’d need to get ready for bed. His hands started up to unhook at his brass stud earrings and stopped there. The girl in the mirror had earrings too, she looked pretty with them on. 

Who was that girl staring back at him? He wasn’t that girl. He ran his fingers over the little brass circles. Girls got their ears pierced. Celia had his ears pierced so that price tags could be attached to them. That would always be the reason they had been pierced. Not for the reasons that girls got their ears pierced. He remembered how it felt to be held down and have his body altered. Girls got to alter their body of their own free will.

Who was that girl staring back at him? He wasn’t that girl. But he wanted to be.

He wanted to be. The boy collapsed to his knees like his strings had been cut. His hands still clutched at his earrings. When he had been taken from his home he had his ears pierced, the boy was the one with pierced ears, not the girl. The boy was not a person to those who had held him. He was just a boy. The boy had no name, he had to steal a name from the other boy. He took it and ran away and mutilated the other boy’s name until it fit his sick fantasy.

He let out the deepest most guttural sob he ever had in his life, which he heard as though it came to him from the other end of a tunnel. Years of trauma washed out of the boy like a culvert that hadn’t been unclogged in decades. That had happened to him. That had all happened. Happened to a boy. Will always have happened to a boy. The boy that he was. The boy he would always be. 

He cried and slumped further. He cried and cried and Grelle came in from the bathroom, blood soaked bandages over her shoulder and tummy. Other than that only thing she was wearing a pair of white boxers. Her chest was flat and masculine, it looked like a man’s chest. The boy still felt it looked indecent, but then again he was far from caring.

She wrapped him up in her long arms and held his head to her breast, slowly rocking back and forth, whispering soft kind phrases.

He sobbed and wailed. He was full of so much sorrow and it all had reached a criticality inside him and was now releasing. He sobbed so hard it felt like he was dying.

“I’m so sorry, I should have never lost myself like that,” she whispered.

“It’s not your fault. I don’t blame you. I could never blame you,” the boy managed to choke out looking up at Grelle.

“But I never want to cause this in you,” she said. The boy couldn’t help but smile, tears still streaming down his cheeks. Grelle cared for him so deeply, so intrinsically. She’d literally taken a bullet for him.

“It’s- It’s because of other stuff. I think,” the boy said nuzzling his head into her sternum. He closed his eyes and listened to her chest. No heart beat inside, but he didn’t need to hear it to know it was there.

“I want to be a girl, Grelle,” whispered the boy like a prayer, “I want to be a girl so bad.”


	6. The Boy Is Dead, Long Live The Boy

“Well, you can be one,” it was a lame line, and Grelle knew Celia knew it too.

Celia was asleep, or what passed for sleep on Celia’s part. Little thing had tuckered herself out with all that weeping. Now Grelle was on the balcony to their hotel room, untied complimentary hotel bathrobe barely covering her bandages and William’s boxers.. It was the only spare change of underwear that she had, and the rest of her clothes were soaking in borax. The undies made her feel closer to him. Yeah, they were a memento, but Grelle severely doubted he’d use them to track her down since he’d already found her so easily and let her go. 

She looked off at the eastern horizon, or to where she knew it was. He was out there living his normal life without her. She wished he was here with her, she felt so clueless without her man telling her what to do. If only he’d professed his undying love like she’d hoped. She was sure there was something there between them, but it hadn’t managed to bear any fruit before it came time to harvest. If he were here he could be the father to Celia in Grelle’s little family fantasy. He could help her raise her daughter. As it stood she was a single mother. 

She wished she had a cigarette, or something. Something to do with her hands while she leaned out into the cool night and pondered. She settled on twiddling the pruning scissors, flipping them open end over end, spinning them over her knuckles.

The child who had schemed their escape had been so capable. But the child she saw now needed all the same love and attention and help as any other kid her age. More even. It was a good thing, she decided, it meant she was growing into a person. Leaving the demon who had superseded her behind; and Grelle didn’t mean the one that was now physically hunting them. Grelle would do anything to watch the child reemerge in Celia, but the material reality was that raising this kid was a bigger handful than she had anticipated. She hoped she could do it alone.

And what about Grelle? What about her own demons?

She instinctively put her hand to her tummy like she did whenever her barrenness overtook her. Only now there were bloody bandages instead of smooth soft skin. The bullet still lay nested inside her, right where her womb should have been. She’d carry it with her for the rest of her days. 

It was an empty space. A place where something precious was missing. She’d kill anyone to have had one. Hell, she’d killed women simply in grim retribution for having one. For the audacity to give up the most precious gift offered to the luckiest denizens of this world. She wondered if she should feel bad for killing them, but she didn’t. She was so much more ethical in those deaths than in any of the others she had caused, even if they weren’t ‘self defense’ or whatever. Angelina was so clinical when she took them apart; Grelle knew there were so many more painful ways to be vivisected; and Grelle made them look pretty first, even if they did ruin the mascara she’d given them with their incessant crying. It was a better death than what she’d gotten, she hadn’t had the opportunity to leave a pretty corpse in the slightest, just an ugly plain-faced man body floating bloodless in a grimy tub. 

Now she looked even more like a man than then. Short hair, men’s suits, clean face. She didn’t know when the tears started falling but they were here. She had no womb. No core with which to bring life into the world. Bodies like hers weren’t meant for nurturing, even she could see that blind as she was. Her body brought death and pain and she didn’t even have the good grace to feel bad for it outside of her own selfish wish to be a gentler person. And on Celia’s behalf of course. Thinking about those women whose lives they had cut short made her sad. Not for them, but for herself. And her daughter.

She wept, exhausted. She sagged, leaving her weight to be supported by the railing alone. She cried for herself for the first time since she’d spent those nights with Angelina, drinking together and crying over their shared trauma. Now she cried alone. No mother figure would overhear her and walk in from the bathroom to rock her softly, to hold her head against her breast. Celia was her daughter, in the other room, sleeping where she belonged.

Grelle was alone now. This was how it should be. Some love would flow back on occasion, but motherhood was a process by which love was given far more than received. 

“Motherhood is a lot lonelier than we thought it would be, Angelina,” she said into the dark. That was her and Angelina’s folly, the thought that having a child would give them the love they so desperately needed. Raising Celia was fulfilling in a way she couldn’t have even imagined but it wasn’t generative, it didn’t bring love and ease into her life. It was hard and draining, but in a good way, like a ten mile hike through the North Pennines. She’d give unto her from her body and soul until there was nothing left, that was a mother’s duty.

Grelle had changed; where there once was nothing but anger and sexuality and self serving there now was the desire to nurture. Being Celia’s mom wasn’t what she’d set out to do. But now it was her _raison d'être._

Grelle collected herself and went back inside to count money and watch over Celia as she slept.

* * *

The light blazed in through the window to the bedroom. Grelle had opened the curtains and let the sunshine come blaring in. The girl had been sleeping. Not well, however. In fact, much worse than normal and that was saying a lot. The girl didn’t know what it meant, but she assumed it was a bad omen. The girl groggily gazed at Grelle who was already dressed and bidding her to get dressed as well so they could start the day.

Some things would never change for the girl.

The girl... was the girl a girl now? Now that she had decided she wanted to be one? She didn’t feel like a girl, but maybe girls didn’t feel like girls, maybe they just were girls regardless. She looked like a girl, even before she made her face up. If she was what she saw in her reflection, and a girl was what she saw, then what she was was a girl. 

A girl brushed her steely black hair and the girl outside of the mirror mirrored her actions so that she could be that girl. A girl had two eyes, and the girl put in a second eye to match the first one but more importantly so that both would make her look like a girl that she saw in the mirror. A girl powdered her face and the girl did as well. The girl couldn’t smile and a girl who looked back at her frowned in sympathy as if to say that it was okay that the girl couldn’t smile. Together they painted their lips and blushed their cheeks. 

A girl in the mirror reached for mascara and eyeliner but the girl was apprehensive. A girl looked at the girl quizzically almost as though to ask what was wrong. The girl told her it was her eyes, that her eyes were wrong and that she hated the idea of people’s gaze being drawn to them. A girl who the girl saw in the mirror insisted telling the girl that to look like her she’d need to put on eye makeup as well.

“Grelle!” the girl called, and she was there, “Can you show me how to put on eyeliner and mascara?”

“Oh, wow, Celia! I would love to!” she said. Celia was the girl’s name and she supposed it sufficed even if there was something wrong about it. She couldn’t tell what but she didn’t have much time to ponder that line of thinking. Grelle was very giddy this morning. She seemed to have a plan since she almost never woke Celia up, always mindful of how much sleep she didn’t get, trying to help in any way she could, letting her sleep in.

It started as a tutorial, but very quickly devolved into Grelle simply doing Celia’s makeup for her. It was nice, the girl didn’t feel very good this morning and having the reins taken from her let her relax a tiny bit. There was something intimate about the way her m- her Grelle worked at her face kneeling before her. Celia looked at her viridian eyes, the pupils were big and dilated but this close they focused on her in a way that they never could from further away. She stuck her tongue out in concentration lining Celia’s eyes. Eventually finishing up the pointy little wings with a sigh.

She held her eyelids as still as she could while Grelle applied the mascara, but it tickled when she did her left eye and Celia involuntarily fluttered her eyelashes splattering mascara up and down her face. Grelle didn’t tsk as Sebastian would have, instead she hardly made any noise at all, brow furrowed in concentration and eyes squinting to see her better even at this distance. She licked her thumb and rubbed at some problem spots on Celia’s face. It was a little weird but she didn’t mind, it was indicative of a level of familiarity that was usually reserved for immediate family members.

“And done! I must say it’s some of my finer work!” Grelle said, stepping back to admire her handiwork, regret immediately passing over her face as she was forced to squint even harder to make out what she had done. The girl turned to the mirror and felt butterflies in her tummy at how pretty a girl she saw in the mirror looked. She thanked Grelle and she blushed. “Anytime, anytime,” she said rubbing at the back of her head.

They packed up their cash into some new trunks that she didn’t bother asking Grelle where she got. As she put her makeup away into her purse she was surprised to find how light it was. She suddenly remembered that the gun Grelle had bought her was gone. It had only been a day but she had gotten used to its presence there already. Celia remembered leaving it on the floor of the bank, a sign to herself that she’d sworn off violence. Grelle had knocked it out of her hand. She’d never said why but the girl didn’t need to be told. Grelle, in her bizarre quest to redeem the girl’s soul, had clearly been compelled to prevent her from taking a man’s life directly. A paradigm she didn’t realize that at the time she had subconsciously acquiesced to. 

It was for the best. Celia wanted to be a girl and girls didn’t kill people.

They left Columbus the same way they had come. She glanced at the newsie stand while Grelle bought a few fashion magazines for the trip. Of course their bank robbery was front page news but Celia didn’t feel compelled to read it. In actuality the thought kind of made her uncomfortable. Celia never wanted to know what other people said about her ever again. She was glad that whatever anyone was saying about Ciel was implicitly about someone that she wasn’t anymore and literally never truly was.

They boarded an overnight train to Dallas. Grelle wanted to take several smaller train lines so that they’d be less easy to track, rather than something more direct. Stopping over for several days in each city, something she thought might throw off any pursuers.

They had managed to get a nice cabin to themselves, and they settled into an easy silence. Celia was still melancholy from the night before and Grelle seemed to be loath to prod, so she just stuck her nose in the magazines she picked up at the station. Celia leaned her head up against the window and watched the landscape blur by them. It was just farmland interrupted by the occasional small woods. Farms and farms passed by her and each looked so similar to the last. The land was flat here in a way that seemed to inspire nothing but repetition in the American Arcadian ideal. 

She watched the landscape pass by for what felt like hours. She didn’t know just when she’d fallen asleep but it was closing in on sunset when Grelle shook her awake. She’d slept the whole day away. Well, perhaps slept was the wrong word. Celia’s nightmares were the most vivid and awful that they’d ever been, and she could remember them all in perfect detail even if the images in her mind didn’t make sense. 

He had been in the center of a Victorian market. The geography of his dreamscape was eerie in its own right, long passages looping back around in ways that couldn’t possibly exist. Shopfronts were multidimensional and would fade in and out of existence. The ground would get closer and he would get smaller, then farther and he would get bigger.

Scenarios around him had played out in strange and grotesque combinations. Lanky butchers killing swans, mutilating their bodies beyond any function or purpose. Faceless mothers purchasing children in markets like produce, swallowing them whole to grow them in their stomachs. Tiny hairless monkeys swarming into toy stores, tearing dolls and figurines to pieces.

He was a boy in a cage placed on the outdoor patio of a restaurant. On the table next to him sat a fuchsia eyed raven. The bird was covered in eyes, and new ones seemed to grow wherever it was that he didn’t look. Crowds of distorted monstrous people would pass by and gawk at him. Some would rush his cage to scream in his face, else reach in to try and pull him apart. The raven would chase them off before slobbering at the mouth and hopping around the table in circles talking to him in tongues about what it wanted to do with his body. The raven had sharp teeth that it would flash him but every time it did so more and more were missing. He’d look down at his hands which were covered in slick wet blood along with the rest of him. It was his blood, he knew somehow.

But now Celia was awake, and Grelle was here with her. She wiped the tears from the girl’s face. She remembered her sitting across but now she was next to her, arm wrapped around her shoulder, magazines discarded on the other side of the cabin.

“Hey kiddo, I think it might be time we go get some supper,” she said, voice dripping with concern. 

“I hope I didn’t scream too loud,” Celia said, trying and failing to break the tension between them.

“Usually you don’t when I comfort you, but this time it didn’t seem to help.” That was certainly an upsetting prospect. She wondered what it might mean if the dreams only got worse from here. If this, or worse, was the new normal. Forget living, could she even survive like this? Right now all the girl could think about was the idea of food and it quite frankly seemed like the only path forward.

* * *

Dinner was lovely, and almost helped the girl forget the terrible nightmare. She felt groggy from having ‘napped’ through most of the day. There was just something about the way that the train bumped and rattled that unlocked her ancient memories of a cranky toddler being rocked to sleep by Tanaka or perhaps some nameless faceless wet nurse that she couldn’t remember. The train shook lightly.

There was a light clacking underneath the table and Celia realized it was Grelle still playing with her Death Scythe. Grelle had been intently listening to a group of four men that had sat down a few tables away throughout dinner. They had been loudly talking about their exploits as members of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Apparently they were traveling to Dallas to assist in a strikebreaking there and the way Grelle had reacted made it clear she wanted to paint them red. Celia didn’t know just what the big deal was aside from their rather rowdy behavior especially after they had had few drinks, but she realized something about it didn’t sit well with Grelle. Perhaps it was just a class thing.

When the men had left to head back to their cabin Grelle made to stand up and follow them. Celia just put her hand on top of hers. Grelle’s expression had changed rapidly, as though she just remembered the girl was there, and she sheepishly sat back down. It was okay, Celia didn’t blame her. This was one of many ways in which she was still human. Still taken by the same human instincts as anyone else. It was something she liked about her. Sebastian would never have cared about anything like that. 

Celia leaned her head against the window watching the landscape slowly darken outside. She smiled at Grelle and told her not to worry about her falling asleep this time at the look of concern on her face. The horizon was at least a tad more interesting in the twilight, she was sure it would keep her attention.

As they rounded a bend the girl noticed something strange. The back two cars of the train had no light emanating from their windows. She couldn’t even see inside of them, it was as though they had been filled with some kind of opaque black substance. Just then the third car from the back of the train’s lights went out followed by a rumble that reverberated up along the train to the dining car.

“Grelle,” Celia started before she interrupted him.

“It’s here,” she said standing up and spinning around trying to get her bearings, Death Scythe in hand. Celia’s breathing got irregular and she got a tight feeling in her stomach, like she was falling. Grelle caught her before her head hit the floor, and she realized just how dizzy she was. Grelle got close to her trying to see if she was alright. Celia opened her mouth to reassure her but instead of words her supper came back up to spill all across the front of Grelle’s suit. The girl looked up to give an apologetic expression but Grelle hadn’t seemed to care; instead she used a table napkin to wipe at Celia’s face before helping her back to her feet. 

Once she was sure Celia was okay, she took her by the hand and started to lead her forward through the train. They made it out of the dining car when the train shook violently as another car was extinguished. The echoes of the rattle had all of the occupants of the train looking confused and worried. Grelle just pushed through them. Celia didn’t know if Sebastian was killing the people in those cars, but she really hoped not. He didn’t need to. Besides, it didn’t seem like his style. Then again, she didn’t really know anything about what the demon was truly capable of, did she?

They were one sleeper car behind the one containing their cabin when they saw a group of men gathered in the hallway. It was the Pinkertons. They were milling about with anxious looks plastered across their faces. One of them was peering out the window trying to see what was happening. A few of them had revolvers out, clutched nervously in their hands.

“Excuse me gentlemen,” Grelle said once she realized they were blocking their path. “I need to get my daughter to our cabin, as you can see she is very sick,” she said gesturing to the vomit down her front.

“Not so fast, wiseguy. Do you know what the hell is going on?” one of the Pinkertons with a handlebar mustache asked in a gruff voice.

“Haven’t the faintest idea my good sir, now if you’d be so kind as to let us through,” Grelle lied, more than a little venom slipping into her voice.

“No one’s going anywhere until we figure this mystery out, alright, milksop,” said one with a fat face and an even fatter revolver brandished openly, clearly intentionally menacing them.

“Another car’s gone dark,” said the one staring out the window, a pasty boy who looked far younger than his peers. The train shook even more violently than before. Grelle pittered about nervously before turning to Celia getting close enough to whisper to her.

“Close your eyes, I don’t want you seeing this.”

“No,” she replied, perhaps a bit more unkind than she intended.

“Please, I don’t want to hurt you again,” she whispered, a certain desperate pleading in her voice.

“It will hurt me to see it, but that’s okay. I can cry like a big girl now.” That seemed to mollify her enough. She merely gave an affirmative noise before turning back to the Pinkertons.

It happened far faster than Celia would have ever thought, far quicker than yesterday which had seemed to go on forever. She approached them with her hands up as though she was entreating them to let her through. It disarmed them enough for her to stab the tips of her death scythe into the mustachioed man’s neck with her left hand. He went to grab at her arms to force the blade out while the fat one swore and raised his revolver to point it at Grelle’s head. Her right arm caught his just in time, pushing the gun up to fire into the ceiling. The younger man turned from the window in surprise and reached into his own coat to pull out what Celia had to assume had to be a gun of his own. Grelle kicked him hard in the sternum knocking him back into the glass. There was an audible crunch and a gun fell out of his jacket.

Grelle flicked the pruning scissors out of the mustachioed man’s neck to a spray of red blood and he slumped against the wall putting his hands to his wound trying hopelessly to stop the bleeding. She twirled in close to the fat man’s body and used the leverage to break his forearm. It was almost tender the way she covered his hand in her own when she bent it back towards his own head and forced him to pull the trigger. She rolled his body to the ground and saw the fourth man, whose cheeks were still a deep red from the drinking they’d done in the dining car earlier, holding out his gun at her preparing to fire. She grabbed the younger looking man while he was dazed and sputtering using him as a shield as the drunk man fired six hollow point bullets into his friend. She let him drop to the floor. The drunk man cursed and tried to make a tactical retreat, stumbling backwards. Grelle covered the ground between the two of them in a flash and stabbed him in the heart.

The Train rumbled and the windows looking into the car directly behind them went dark. Grelle quickly reaped the two of them that she hadn’t already stabbed with her Death Scythe and held out her unbloodied hand for Celia who took it eagerly. She heard sobs. Looking up at Grelle, Celia realized that it was actually her who was crying. 

Tears fell down Grelle’s face as she grabbed their luggage from their cabin and hurried them along to the front of the train. No one else paid them any mind, conductors and passengers alike too concerned with the trains increasingly violent shakes. They even passed by the team of engineers who were headed towards the back to investigate, leaving the engine alone and unguarded. 

Once they got to the coal-car Grelle secured their luggage and gave Celia a boostie up into the coal bin telling her to shovel as much as she could into the furnace before turning to work at decoupling the locomotive from the rest of the train. Walking on the shifting coal in her kitten heels on a moving and shaking train in the rapidly darkening twilight was a far greater challenge than the girl could handle and she tumbled face first into the black rocks almost instantly. She was covered in coal dust and her dress was probably ruined along with her makeup.

It wasn’t fair, she had to suffer abuse and dysphoria and spend the rest of her life on the run and now her favorite dress was irreparably stained with black coal dust. She just sat there face down in the coal for a moment before the urgency of the situation crept up on her with another violent shake of the train. She heard Grelle swear and when she sat up to look back at her she saw the final car of the train had gone dark. 

Grelle had switched tactics, instead of working fruitless at the decoupage mechanism she pulled out her Death Scythe and was trying to simply cut the engine free. A chill ran up Celia’s spine as she looked through the threshold of the last car which opened into unnatural opaque blackness. She couldn’t see anything in it, but she could feel that he was there, as sure as she could feel the coal beneath her.

“Grelle, hurry!” Celia shouted, feeling useless the moment the words left her mouth. Grelle squeaked leaning further down and out of Celia’s line of sight briefly.

“I cut it!” she shouted triumphantly, holding her scissors aloft as though they were Excalibur. Celia didn’t believe her at first since the train’s sheer inertia kept it from falling away from them for far longer than she would have ever expected. With immense relief it eventually, ever so slowly, started to drift away.

She saw something moving out of the darkness. She couldn’t quite make out what it actually looked like even though she was staring right at it. It was dark and had fuchsia eyes but the rest of its form seemed so deeply unknowable that she felt like her brain simply couldn’t process it. 

It moved like a ballerina underwater. The way it posed as it prepared to jump the gap was so elegant, the movements so beautiful that in that moment Celia was incapable of hating it.

A pair of scissors grew out of where she thought its face might have been and it fell back into the darkness. She looked down at Grelle who was empty handed. 

“Easy come, easy go,” she said looking back up at Celia, eyes still full of tears. It wasn't until she saw the look of concern on Grelle’s face that the girl realized she was standing, foot on the lip of the bin as though she were about to dive out towards the rapidly receding train.

Grelle climbed up, luggage in tow, wrapping her arms around Celia, gingerly leading her across the coal towards the engineer’s cabin. Celia sat down on the edge, hanging her feet over the gap between the coal-car and the engine. Grelle shoveled some coal and worked at the controls a bit before sitting down next to her.

“I wish I had some hot cocoa to give you,” she said. Instead, in her hand she had a warm damp rag that she used to wipe the girl’s face clean of coal dust. Celia felt numb in a way that she hadn’t in months, the way she had when she was Ciel Phantomhive. She didn’t cry even though she felt like she should. She just let Grelle move on to wipe at her hands. She wasn’t crying, but Grelle still was.

“Why are you crying?” she asked her bluntly. It might have been insensitive, but if Grelle really didn’t want to talk about it she wouldn’t.

“I don’t…” Grelle started with a whisper that could barely be heard over the sound of the steam engine. She raised her voice. “I, um... I don’t like that I bring death into the world. I, um, well... I wish my body was one that could bear life instead.” She watched Grelle absentmindedly place her free hand over her lower stomach. 

“I think I know what that feels like,” Celia said, trying to be comforting but fearing she came off as dismissive.

“Yes, I suppose you would,” Grelle replied, finishing wiping at Celia’s hands. They had gotten as clean as they were going to until she would get the chance to take a proper bath.

“Do you regret killing them?”

“Not them, no. Well, not _for_ them, anyway,” Grelle said, tilting her head to the side as though she were trying to work through a particularly tough logic puzzle. “I suppose I only feel bad about doing it for me. I feel bad that I am someone who kills, but not about the killings themselves.” She sighed and looked off into the middle distance at nothing in particular. “Not the most redemptive sorrow, now is it?” she added jokingly.

“No, but I’m sure it’s a start,” Celia said leaning over to rest her head on Grelle’s shoulder. They sat there like that for a while, quiet but for the sound of the chugging steam engine behind them, as Grelle’s tears dried up and she wrapped her arm around the girl to hold her close.

All she could think about in that moment was Ciel.

“They killed him, Grelle,” she said breaking the silence. “They killed Ciel. He died in that ritual chamber.” The older woman hummed an acknowledgement and held her closer. “No you don’t understand,” the girl started, “I’m saying he literally died. I’m not Ciel.”

“What do you mean?” Grelle asked, pulling away slightly to turn and face her.

“Ciel was my twin. When I got out I told everyone I was him. I told everyone I died. I… I think that taking his identity was a way for me to escape who I was. But it turned out to be another kind of cage, I think. One that I was so quickly willing to die in.”

Grelle mulled that information over for a moment. This was something that the girl had never told anyone, never thought she’d ever tell anyone, thought that she would bring with her to her early grave. Being someone else had dulled the pain of being who she was born to be ever so slightly. But that had ended now. This was all about her trying to be herself, right? 

“I don’t think I want to take his identity anymore,” the girl said. “I think I’d like to let his name rest. ‘Celia’ just feels wrong. I think I’d like to go by something else.”

“Well then, what should I call you?” Grelle asked, a big smile on her face, voice dripping with love.

“I don’t know,” the girl said. She really hadn’t thought about it. She had a few ideas, but nothing felt right. Real girls didn’t name themselves anyway. “Why don’t you name me?”

“What? Me? Why me?”

“I’m not dumb, I realize you see me as your daughter. Mothers should name their daughters,” the girl said. The radiance coming off from Grelle's expression nearly blinded the girl in her one remaining eye.

“Alright, I might need some time to think it over, I may just call you daughter until then,” Grelle replied standing up. “In the meantime, I think it might be best for us to get far away from wherever this train was headed. I think we should forget the whole city hopping idea and move right on to Los Angeles.”


	7. The Boulevard Is Not That Bad

Rosalind Whitechapel stepped into the tailor shop. It was the same one she had visited when she first arrived in Los Angeles, looking to replace the dress her mom had bought her which had been ruined rolling around in a bin of coal. Her favorite burgundy dress was hard to replace and Grelle had taken her to three or four different shops before they found this one. The older woman who ran it seemed to have a good eye for simple lines and striking silhouettes. She didn’t substitute frills and lace for mastery over form, and Ros loved her for it. She bought all her dresses here, perhaps a few more than she needed.

Now Rosalind wasn’t shopping for herself though, and she made that clear to the woman behind the counter as she purused her wares. Today, she was looking for something for Grelle. She had bought herself a few new suits since arriving in LA, after her first was covered in all the industrial and sewer runoff of the Hudson, not to mention blood and vomit. But even though she saw a few suits that Grelle might like, that wasn’t exactly what she was after at the moment.

It had been hard getting away from Grelle for the afternoon, but after four months of quiet she’d grown a tad more lax in her, admittedly justified, overprotectiveness. She’d even let Rosalind get a very part time job in a bakery like they had talked about in Columbus. She didn’t do too much actual baking. For the most part she just wore a cute outfit and helped customers order cakes and box up confectionaries. They didn’t need the money, but it helped Ros feel more like a normal person. There were times during the middle of her shifts when she’d completely forget who she was. Or _what_ she was. In a way she had more freedom right now working a job than she ever had back in England. So she was thankful to be out of her surrogate mother’s sight for more than a few minutes. Especially with how short that range of sight was. She was growing up after all and Grelle said a young woman needed independence.

Her latent puberty had finally begun creeping up on her over the past few months. Grelle had seemingly planned for the possibility of her desire to grow into a woman and had some scientific notes on synthesizing estrogen, apparently written by some reaper she had known in Dispatch. Technically, it was a level of technology humans weren’t supposed to have access to yet.

It made Rosalind sad to think about in a strange way, the idea that other people who wanted to be girls could be out there and just not have the technology to make them look like one. She wished she could share this experience with someone since Grelle couldn’t participate in it. As a reaper her body wouldn’t age and that also meant it couldn’t change. It would always be frozen, appearing the way it had in the moment she took her life for the rest of eternity. For the most part anyway. Like those old primary school rumors, her hair and fingernails did continue to grow after death. Rosalind wished Grelle could take the hormones with her, that she could watch Grelle grow more feminine alongside her. Unfortunately, it was a trail she’d have to blaze alone.

Flipping through rack after rack Ros finally found something she thought might be decent. More than a little decent. Actually it was perfect. She almost ran to the front with how excited she was but slowed down sheepishly when she realized the woman behind the counter was watching her. She could be such a child sometimes. 

“Isn’t this a little out of your size?” She asked, getting chummy with one of her regular customers. “Who is this for, young lady?”

“My mom,” Ros said without thinking. “I thought she deserved a surprise.”

“Oh! Pardon me, for some reason I got it into my head that your handsome father was a widower.” She wasn’t wrong, that was what Grelle had told her when she had chit chatted with her the first time they shopped here. Ros had slipped up and the thought of being under scrutiny made her heart race and body feel tingly all over. Luckily it seemed like this woman was too polite to point out the fallacy. “I haven’t met your mom, you should bring her by some time. I’d love to meet the woman who raised such a bright and tasteful young girl.”

“I’m sure you’ll get to see her eventually!” Ros said, fishing some money out of her purse. She really hoped that was true. She counted out the paper money and coins while the woman behind the counter folded up the garment she’d picked out and stuck it into a big fancy paper bag. She grabbed it and said her goodbyes before rushing out the door.

“Good to see you, Rosalind!” The woman behind the counter called after her.

Rosalind. That was the girl’s name now. It was a pretty name, picked out for her by her mother. It had taken only a day or two before Grelle had decided on it. She told her right as they crossed the border into New Mexico, rumbling along in a train that thankfully wouldn’t be waylaid by a demon.

Grelle told her it was because she loved roses but the girl couldn’t believe that was the end to it. She only needed to look at Grelle’s face to see there was something more. She was strangely reticent but caved after only a brief prodding. 

“When I was your age I accompanied my father into the city as he had to attend to some business. What it was I can’t remember and I’m not certain I was ever even told. I hated being alone with my father and after several days of travel I was more than ready to slip off on my own. And slip off on my own I did while my father went about his business. I wasn’t going anywhere in particular, but eventually I found myself in an outdoor theatre. I had snuck in right as a troupe was performing a dress rehearsal. The play itself didn’t particularly grab my attention. Not at first anyway. Instead I was enraptured by their costumes. I had never seen such pretty clothes in all my life. Beautiful dresses, beautiful jewelry, beautiful everything,” Grelle said, almost embarrassed. 

“And this was an old style of troupe, with um... Men, um... Playing the women... With men wearing the dresses…” she continued, too embarrassed to look at the girl, instead watching the blur of the low forest of desert bushes fly past outside their window. “But it wasn’t the pretty clothes that kept me there, there was something about the story that had me petrified. It was _As You Like It._ And well, Rosalind is the main character, so that’s why. I’m sure you’re familiar with Shakespeare and why she might remind me of you,” Grelle concluded, still not looking at the girl. She could tell there was yet more to the story she wasn’t telling her.

“Hm. Well, then. What does this play mean to you?” the girl prodded.

“I hated it!” Grelle exploded, turning to the girl and looking towards her for the first time since she started the story. “Nothing had ever made me angrier in my life! I had been hurt by people since I could first sneak off to play with my sisters’ dolls, hurt both physically and emotionally for being an effeminate sissy, but nothing had upset me as much as watching these strangers pretending to be people who had never even existed. By the end of it my face was streaked with tears and I was dehydrated from all the fluid loss. 

“I hated it because it’s a story about a bunch of pretty clothed nobles running off to the countryside to live in pastoral bliss. It’s a gross fantasy. They give up their pristine cushy lives of luxury to play at some fake Arcadian ideal. It’s something for wealthy urbanites to watch and get swept away with the dream of a small cottage in the woods with no troubles. The countryside is nothing like that! The countryside was nothing but pain and hurt and sorrow for me. I was drowning in provinciality and here were these actors boiling down my trauma into a pretty little fiction.

“But more than that I hated that she got to take off her man’s disguise at the end. I hated that in the end she got to reveal she was a woman underneath the whole time and marry the man of her dreams. I wished I could just take off my man’s disguise and be seen as the woman I wanted to be. More than anything I wanted to be Rosalind taking off Ganymede. But as much as I try to take off Grelle, all there is is more Grelle.

“But,” she sighed, “I’m used to that now. I don’t hate being Grelle.

“I never returned to my father after that. I never said goodbye to anyone in my family or hometown. I was so bitter that I just ran off to London; lying, cheating, and stealing my way to an early grave,” Grelle finished, leaning back in her seat with an easy smile returning to her face. The girl took a moment to soak it all in.

“If you wanted to be Rosalind, you could be her. If we’re going by parallels wouldn’t you be her, being a woman who’s run away while disguised as a man?” the girl had asked.

“And who would that make you, then?” Grelle replied with a smirk. The girl had to think about it for a moment.

“Ah!” The girl recalled the name of Rosalind’s cousin.

“Exactly. And no, I didn’t pick Rosalind just because I didn’t want to stick you with the same name again, even if that would have been really funny. No, I think you’re Rosalind because you’re the one escaping a life of tormentous nobility, I’m just along for the ride. I think you’re Rosalind because you’re the hero of this story.”

“You’re… just along for the ride? Didn’t you want this?” The girl was suddenly worried. She thought that this was Grelle’s escape just as much as it was her own.

“I thought I did. But I’ve found that running away from my duties as a reaper wasn’t exactly all I had imagined it to be, yeah. I miss my friends, Ros. A lot,” she replied, continuing at the frown the girl was giving her. “Don’t worry, I found something else, being along for the ride as it were. Something more valuable than I ever imagined.” She paused for a moment before sitting forward. “Someday I think you might find it too.”

That reveal had snapped a little something inside of her. Ros had assumed that the life Grelle was leaving had been just as toxic and destructive as her own, she had assumed that Grelle was alike in her lack of regrets. She thought this was as much Grelle’s adventure as it was her own. The thought that Grelle might have given up something, let alone the possibility of everything, on her behalf didn’t sit right.

And that feeling had festered in her until she now found herself walking home alone, oversized paper bag over one arm. Even in autumn the city was hot and she used her parasol to block out a good deal of sun.

She clutched the little folded piece of paper in her purse tightly. It was a little prayer. A prayer that she might repay her mother for just a little of what she’d given up on her behalf.

She got to their downtown apartment, it was nice but modest. Grelle said she wanted to spread out their funds but Rosalind suspected that was only part of it. She seemed to have a general disdain for immense wealth. She used to disguise it under the facetiousness of her flamboyant personality, but now without pretense it took the form of a much more blunt, if subdued, hostility. Even still she had an intense material love for the finer and prettier things of the world which was something Ros was banking on for the success of her gift.

She stepped through the door and locked the deadbolts Grelle had installed. Grelle also had set up several escape routes and packed multiple bags full of cash and necessities hidden in the apartment and dead drops around the city. She didn’t want what happened in Brooklyn to happen again. As the days went by Rosalind felt less and less like she needed them, but Grelle was slower to let go of the security.

She heard a faint singing coming from behind the door to the study. Grelle could sing, and she sang well, but she was a baritone and there were times when the manliness of her voice made her uncomfortable singing in public. She’d only ever sing around other people if she trusted them. That, or she thought the goof was funny enough, which she would be the first to admit was a pretty low threshold for her.

Even through the door she could make out the melody and lyrics to HMS Pinafore. She didn’t knock, and Grelle didn’t stop singing when she entered, instead turning from the work on her desk and standing at attention like a British sailor.

> For in spite of all temptations
> 
> To belong to other nations,
> 
> He remains an Englishman!
> 
> He remains an E-e-e-english _man!_

“Sorry, I missed the rest of the performance,” Ros said, amused.

“Don’t worry, I shall put on another matinee tomorrow,” Grelle said, a shark-toothed grin spread across her face. “Now what can _your_ loyal Englishman do for you, my Josephine?” Her unfocused eyes fell over Rosalind and then curiously at the bag in her hand. 

“Well, read this,” Rosalind said, reaching into her purse to pull out the folded up flyer. She handed it out to Grelle who took it and held it close to her face in order to read the words. 

“A church sponsored public dance? Interesting,” she said. “You’d like my permission to go?”

“Well, yes. But more importantly, I’d like _you_ to go with me.”

Grelle made a noise of recognition. She was about to open her mouth in protest, clearly uncomfortable performing the role expected of a heterosexual man in a public function. She could play a man, and she could, at times, find her admitting a certain level of attraction to other women, but performing attraction to women as a man was something that she knew made Grelle’s skin crawl. One of the only times she had ever seen Grelle uncomfortable was when the tailor woman had flirted with her, thinking she was a man.

“Before you decide, take a look at what I’ve bought you,” Rosalind said, pulling out the garment from her bag and setting it out on the desk. It was a dress, one in a sexy shade of red with a waistline that Ros thought would flatter Grelle’s figure. Grelle grabbed it and held it close to inspect it. A look of longing flashed across her face before being immediately replaced by apprehension.

“But, what about my cover story being your father?”

“No one we know is going to be there,” Rosalind assuaged. “It’ll just be one night. Besides, what's the possibility someone from the reaper dispatch is going to be there and then how would they even recognize you?”

“But… But…” She was just looking for excuses to be miserable, a pattern Rosalind recognized because she’d seen it in herself for years. Grelle managed to come up with several more reasons why she couldn’t possibly go until she finally caved and it was like a switch had been flipped inside the woman. She suddenly started grinning and babbling about how she wanted to do her hair and makeup and what kind of men she might run into.

“You haven’t been with any men since we left England, Grelle. It felt like you used to flirt with every guy you met and now that you’re living a stable, well, _semi_ stable life I think it might be nice for you to treat yourself to some love,” Rosalind said as Grelle changed into the dress behind a folded screen in her bedroom. In this place they only had each other, and while Ros relied on Grelle for emotional support Grelle never asked for any in return. Grelle deserved a little romance. She had always been incredibly forward with men, flirting with Sebastian before Ros even knew she was a woman. Grelle hadn’t so much as come onto anyone, and Ros felt like she was lonely.

But more than that Grelle deserved to look like the woman she was, if only for a night. She had spent almost half a year with short hair in stuffy men’s suits. Even if she wore men’s clothes for the most part as a reaper she still had make up and long hair that she was forced to abstain from. Grelle deserved a break.

Rosalind remembered how the last dance she had attended with Grelle had gone. That time she had been dressed as a girl while Grelle was dressed as a man. She intended for them both to be dressed as themselves this time.

Grelle stepped out from behind the screen with a level of confidence Ros hadn’t seen in her in a long time. 

“Looks good, huh?” she said. It really did. More than anything Rosalind was surprised by how accurate the fit was. “You did a great job, Ros, I’m really impressed.” The girl blushed at the praise, and Grelle’s hand found its way to her head to tousle her hair. They spend the next few hours putting on makeup and gossiping. Grelle even sang a few Gilbert and Sullavan songs for her in excitement.

Out of her suit and tie, Grelle really started to look her age. She made a passable young father all dolled up as a man, but looking like this it was obvious she would have had to have been a preteen when Ros was born, making the lie of Grelle her being her biological parent virtually impossible. She had only been twenty five when she died and her youth was striking. With makeup on she looked even younger. 

As time would go on Grelle would be less and less believable as her father, even in boymode, and she’d need to pick another identity. Perhaps in a few years she could create a new cover story that she was Ros’ older sister, then Grelle could be Grelle again.

Looking in the mirror Rosalind was confident they had done all they could to prepare. Grelle was the type who wanted to be fashionably late to every engagement but she also was the type who hated sitting around just waiting so they took off.

It wasn’t like any of the dances Rosalind had ever been to. It wasn’t in a wealthy noble person's estate for one. Instead they were in the center of a modestly decorated indoor gymnasium. Upon a raised platform in the corner a small eclectic band fiddled with their instruments. 

The dance was sponsored by a nearby church but the young minister feared holding the dance in one would scare away the very people he wanted to reach putting on these kinds of events. He had been trying over the past few years to save the moral soul of Los Angeles' youth. As such he had tried to set up public functions like this one to draw more members to their flock and, more importantly, keep as many young people out of the bars and gambling halls as possible. If he could help a few bachelors and bachelorettes get together and away from a life of promiscuity, well then that was a plus. These dances were just about the only nightlife that the city had that was family friendly and available to any socioeconomic background.

A crowd had already started mingling about by the time they arrived. Everyone was wearing their Sunday best it seemed, and Ros who had internally fretted that they had overdressed for the occasion was thankful to realize that they were merely the best dressed in the room by a little bit.

Grelle immediately kissed Rosalind on the forehead and wandered off to get a closer look at some of the men gathered before them. Ros walked over towards the snack table and picked up an orange and started peeling it. She hadn’t thought this far ahead, just what was it she was going to do now that she was here. She definitely didn’t fancy dancing with anyone, and even though she’d changed a lot over the past half a year she still wasn’t in any way interested in making small talk with strangers for its own sake. 

It was okay, this night was for Grelle anyway, not her.

The night went on and Rosalind at the very least was enjoying the music and snacks that had been provided. The band wasn’t like those she’d heard play at high society events. It was mostly brass instruments that were loud and obnoxious in all the right ways. They did have a violinist but the way she played was fast and hard. All in all it was far more folksy than Ros was used to. The snacks were the typical Californian fruits she’d come to expect, along with a few dry crackers and other biscuits. There was also some non-alcoholic fruit punch that had been dosed with seltzer to give it the bubbly texture Ros had fallen in love with since arriving in America.

A few young men came up and offered to dance with her, but she cordially turned them all away. Thankfully her generally aloof demeanor managed to stave off the majority of other would-be suitors.

She wondered if she ought to take one of them up on their offer to dance.

She was a girl now, did that mean she ought to like men? Grelle liked men, but she wasn’t shy about discussing her unrequited feelings for her aunt. Ros didn’t know if she liked men or women. Maybe she would grow to like men more as she grew older. Maybe she didn’t like anyone and never would. Maybe maybe maybe.

Rosalind was considering the maybes when another man came up to her to ask her to dance. He didn’t go away immediately when she politely declined. The dance was a dry event, being put on by the church as it were. Still, Ros was pretty sure the young man had been drinking. He was starting to get just a little handsy. 

Ros felt alone. She was in trouble but Grelle couldn’t see her. Just like in front of the ice cream parlor on their first day in America. Grelle couldn’t see her, but she might hear her.

All she needed to do was call out for help and help would come, she knew it. But she remembered a time once when she was in a cage in a room full of strangers and had cried out for help. She remembered the help that had come.

She wasn’t sure which pair of high heels would click across the hardwood floor to her rescue. She felt too alone and too childish to contemplate any alternate course of action.

“Grelle!” she shouted a little timidly, fearful of drawing further attention to herself, and she was there.

“Pardon me sir, but I do believe my daughter isn’t interested.”

“Your daughter?” he said incredulously.

“My daughter,” she confirmed, taking Rosalind's hand and leading her briskly away and out into the center of the dance floor. They weren’t far before Ros turned to see the man had already moved on to some more receptive woman.

The band finished up their song and rested a moment before starting in on something slow and sweet. Grelle cocked her head to the side before turning around to face Rosalind, soft smile forming on her lips.

“Fancy a mother-daughter dance?” she asked. Ros didn’t know what to think.

“Uh, sure.”

Rosalind tried her best to remember the dancing that she had learned in England but quickly she realized that she didn’t need to. Grelle led her, and she followed. Besides, this dance here was so different from those in the English aristocracy. It was far less structured, far more human bodies moving in time to music however they wanted. 

It was nice, being here in this moment with her mother. She had started thinking of Grelle as her mother a while ago but the real implications of that decision had come over her in waves. She had a mom now, even if her real parents had… died. In the… fire. A mom who loved her and would protect her intrinsically like a mother should. Grelle asked nothing in return. Not for her to grow into Lord Phantomhive, nor her soul. She merely loved her for love’s own sake.

The music was nice and she had a mom who loved her and she was dancing and she was a girl in a beautiful dress and she had drank bubbly fruit punch earlier and-

“Rosalind,” Grelle exclaimed softly with surprise in her voice.

“Huh?” she replied, looking up at her to see a face filled with love.

“You’re smiling,” Grelle said, a certain capriciousness slipping into her voice. She wasn’t wrong. Rosalind could feel her mouth smiling. She could feel her eyes smiling. Her whole face, her whole body was smiling.

“So I am,” she acknowledged.

“So you are,” Grelle confirmed.

They danced for a little while longer, and then a few more times after that. Eventually Ros got exhausted, but in a good way, like a two mile walk through the woods behind the Phantomhive Estate. Grelle said she was convinced none of the men at the dance were her type and they headed home hand in hand.

They took off their makeup together, Grelle told her about some of the biggest duds of the night and for the first time Ros was able to giggle back with her. She felt like a little girl. Her giggles were a new sound she didn’t know she could make anymore and it looked like Grelle liked the sound of them too.

Rosalind crawled into her bed still smiling. She didn’t ever want to stop smiling. Smiling felt so good. She closed her eyes and tried to get some sleep. 

She woke up shrieking. She didn’t even hear her voice or know where she was until she felt Grelle beside her. The nightmares hadn’t gotten as bad as they were in the nights immediately surrounding the day they left Columbus, but they hadn’t gotten much better either. She felt cold and she shook violently. This wasn’t too abnormal for her. Just one of her worse nights, and hopefully not a cause for undue alarm.

Grelle held her and shushed her and she just sobbed. She didn’t remember any of it but for a slurry of intense feelings and vague images that didn’t feel like they could fit in her brain. She just cried.

“Can I,” she started but she felt like she couldn’t finish it for embarrassment. She felt too alone and too childish to contemplate any alternate course of action. “Can I sleep with you tonight?” she asked.

“Sure hon,” Grelle said, picking her up off the bed like she weighed nothing at all. She wondered if she did. If she might just float away if she were to to be dropped. Grelle set her on her bed delicately, tucking her in before walking around to the other side. She wouldn’t find out tonight.

Grelle lay there beside her. 

Rosalind snuggled into her. 

And she slept.


	8. Or, The Slave Of Duty

It was early December and the opening night for Grelle’s production of _The Pirates of Penzance_ . She had auditioned at Rosalind’s encouragement and her _authentic_ posh accent along with her rather remarkable singing voice had secured her the role of Major-General Stanley. 

Rosalind had been worried about the prospect of her playing a man, but in her words she had been ‘playing a man all her life’ and was therefore perfectly suited to the role. She was so excited when she came home one day to show Ros her fake bushy mustache, and she wore it around the apartment almost all the time now.

Ros spent her nights home from the bakery practicing line reads with Grelle who had become intimately committed to perfecting her performance. She really had been acting all her life, and Ros wondered if she had forced herself to go on as Ciel if she might have become an actor in time. She remembered the debacle of the last time they had performed together. That had felt like a real major turning point in her life, but it never really paid off and within a fortnight she was back to her usual depressive, destructive self. If she had a better head on her shoulders she’d have run away that night, but unfortunately she had to suffer longer as the Phantomhive boy.

Ros could tell Grelle was really happy in a way she hadn’t been since they had come to America. Grelle always smiled when she was around Ros but never with her eyes and there were times when she’d catch Grelle alone with a thousand yard stare, lips curled into a contemplative scowl. When she sang to Ros or paraded around their living room in her ridiculous Major General’s uniform, Ros could see the smile reaching her eyes in a way she only ever saw during that night at the dance or whenever she did any particularly affectionate mothering.

Ros had special box seating to watch the opening night of her mom’s play and she was giddy with anticipation. She had worn one of her favorite dresses along with a beautiful knit shawl that Grelle had bought her as an early birthday present. Even if winter in LA was nothing like winter in England it still could get a little nippy at night. Little kitten heels, stockings, purse, and parasol rounded out the outfit and she felt like a proper young lady attending the opera. 

Now, that she could smile and laugh like a real kid, Grelle had taken her to a few comedic plays and they had become a favorite of hers. The world of comedy was something she found she really enjoyed in a way she never thought she’d be able to and there was no one funnier in her mind than Grelle.

Grelle performed wonderfully, Ros was certain the papers would call her the breakout star of the evening. She delivered her lines with perfect comedic timing and her voice carried across the room in a way that gave Ros goosebumps. She didn’t stumble over anything or anyone as she moved about the stage like she had fretted she would. Thankfully the many hours going over her marks had paid off and even as terrible as her eyesight was she made it through the night unscathed.

She looked at Major-General Stanley’s many daughters and wondered if she should have tried auditioning to be one of them. She wondered what it might have been like if she had been in a larger family, had many sisters. If she was a girl and she and Ciel were twins, she wondered if he might have found out he was one too. Was there a world where they lived a normal life and might have whispered in hushed tones into the early hours of the morning about how they longed to be girls? Or a world where he wasn’t, and he was instead her protective older brother?

She was happy with her life now though, and there was no use bringing up the evil spirits of the past. Her other demons. Her real demons.

There was a standing ovation and Ros tried as hard as she could for her applause to stand out among the cacophony, but she was certainly drowned out. Her hands stung and she felt like a silly little girl. Still, Grelle looked up to where she knew she was sitting when they finished bowing right before the curtain finally fell. Ros waved even though she knew she couldn’t see her.

Rosalind waited outside the back of the theatre, a bouquet of red roses in her arms. She had been right in assuming it would be a chilly evening and she shivered holding her shawl closer around her. She hadn’t been waiting for very long at all when the doors opened up and Grelle stepped out into the dark night to meet her.

It felt like a cold front had just come in, but in that moment her heart was more than warmed by the presence of Grelle. It was a little dark, but it looked to Rosalind like Grelle was wearing one of her older suits. She got one of her trademarked shark toothed grins at the sight of her, and Ros just smiled back.

“Hm... such a lovely smile,” Grelle said, taking Ros’ chin in between her thumb and forefinger tilting it up to get a better look. Rosalind held out the bouquet for Grelle to take. “Aw, well isn’t that sweet, you got me flowers,” she said letting her go to grab them out of her hands and turning to amble with her down the alleyway towards home.

“Well, you were really good tonight, I thought you deserved it,” Rosalind said, absentmindedly swinging her parasol back and forth as she walked beside her.

“Thank you so very much, sweet child,” Grelle replied before adding: “That is such a lovely dress on you,” after looking her up and down.

“Thanks, I picked it out myself.”

“Mmhmm. You wear a lot of dresses now. You like wearing dresses.” Grelle said. Ros wasn’t sure if it was a question or a statement but she figured she’d answer it anyway.

“Yeah, I mean you know, there’s something about them that makes me feel better.”

“I always found that so interesting. What is it about clothes that makes a person love or hate wearing them? It’s so interesting that the way an individual looks changes what they are to others. One could wear a suit and be a man or one could wear a dress and be a woman. Don’t you find that interesting, child?”

“I suppose.”

“Gender is such a unique affectation of the Seraphim, do you think humanity is better off with their blessing? I know you’ve encountered those who don’t believe so.”

“I mean, I like being a girl, I don’t know what I’d be if I wasn’t one, to be honest. If I didn’t have a gender then I guess whoever that person was they wouldn’t be me.” Rosalind didn’t know what brought out this strange philosophical side of Grelle and she didn’t really understand exactly where she was going with this but she wasn’t complaining. They continued through the empty streets which seemed to be completely devoid of life in a way Rosalind didn’t find curious in the slightest.

“You are so un-angry, child. Is that what that dress is to you? That is to say, your dress is a fitting substitute for the deaths of those who took away your happy life? I would love to understand before the end, but I suppose we don’t always get what we want,” Grelle asked, stopping them underneath a streetlamp and turning to look her squarely in the eye.

“I- I- I can’t think... Why does my head feel so fuzzy?” Rosalind’s gaze fell to the pavement. She tried to look up, tried to see the world around her. She could see some of the world out of the corner of the eye. It was black, black as far as the eye could see, broken only by the regular intervals of stark white street lamps. The bouquet in Grelle’s arms was grey, as was her skin. It was like all the color of the world had flushed down the Arroyo Calabasas. Ros finally managed to sluggishly look up at Grelle. Her smile was small and loving but it didn’t reach her eyes. Her eyes were full of something, something that Ros couldn’t begin to understand.

“Ros, is that you? Who is that you’re with?” called out a voice from behind her. Rosalind turned her head to see Grelle still in her bright red costume from the show half a block away illuminated by a streetlamp. Ros turned back towards the Grelle she was with to see a long black claw swipe at her face. As deeply compelled to simply accept her fate as she was, four billion years of evolution had led to this moment. The full extent of life on Earth had hardwired her to at least try and block the blow. Instead of being cut to ribbons the claw caught and was arrested on her parasol.

The thing in front of her looked at her curiously. Ros knew the parasol was something special, but whatever it was was far more powerful that she had imagined. Grelle was next to her, the real Grelle, dressed like a British Major-General. In one smooth motion Grelle grabbed Rosalind and took the parasol from her hand, spinning so that her body was between them. 

Just like that night on the train Ros couldn’t properly see what it was, but she knew it was the entity she had once named Sebastian. It loomed over Grelle and the parasol dissolved into a thin wooden stick with a little iron on the end. A weed puller, a Death Scythe, from the reaper she had killed on the ship so long ago.

Grelles eyes were unfocused and full of fear as she held the Death Scythe in a combative pose. 

“Run away, Rosalind,” her voice called out. Ros was rooted to the spot.

The demon took a step towards Grelle, only a few of its fuschia eyes on her. The rest were squarely focused on Ros. It took another step and its heel clicked against the pavement. It moved lightning-quick towards Ros only to be blocked by Grelle’s swing of the Death Scythe.

She nicked it and a small spurt of black blood fountained out of where it was hit. 

“Keep your eyes on me, big boy,” Grelle said, voice shaky.

The creature swung at her with a large arm and she parried it. She was firmly on the defensive, and even this much was difficult for her. Ros knew with the certainty of dreams that the noble beast which was once named Sebastian was only toying with her. Testing the waters with this reaper. Even though she barely stood a chance she could hurt it if she was lucky, and it was not going to underestimate her again.

It feinted towards her before moving for Rosalind again. Grelle was just fast enough to block the attack and wrestle the thing away from Ros, but the desperation in her actions had left an opening. One that the noble beast wouldn’t leave unexploited in any timeline. 

Grelle screamed and Rosalind saw a spray of blood. Something got airborne and she watched it hang stark against the night sky for what felt like hours before falling at her feet. It was an arm.

She turned to Ros, eyes wet with tears. She still held the Death Scythe in her remaining hand as the creature looked on at her curiously, like a bird at a crumb.

“Please run, Rosalind.”

“Don’t make me leave you,” she whispered like a prayer. She couldn’t lose her mom again.

“Do it for me, for your mom. I love you. Please run away.”

For her she would, and for her she did.

* * *

“Okay, what the fuck was that about?” Grelle shouted as soon as they were alone in the doctor’s urban manse. She lit the entryway’s hearth and a few lanterns for light but that was where the butler facade ended. This wasn’t the meek fuck-up servant Grelle, as funny as he was, this was the actual Grelle. Possibly even a pissed-off Grelle, she’d just have to wait and see.

“What do you mean?” Angelina asked defensively. “I thought the evening went rather swimmingly. I’m surprised you don’t think so as well. We got to attend a lovely ball, we got to lead the boy on a wild goose chase, and most importantly we got to be seen in public while you ran off and attended to another one of my patients. All in all, it was a wonderful night.” Angelina took off her coat and gloves and went to warm her hands by the fireplace. Grelle angrily adjusted her glasses and strode over to her, shoving her finger in her face.

“You made him dress up as a little girl? As some kind of fucking joke?” Grelle said, more than a little hurt in her voice.

“What? I always wanted a daughter. I said as much.”

“Oh! So he’s your pretty little girl then is he? The petulant little boy whose handsome butler just so happens to be a shadow lord from the ninth circle? The kid who’s hunting you down to have you hung for murder, _that’s_ your daughter?”

“So what if I see him as my son? That’s my prerogative. I had my motherhood taken from me, Grelle,” she said, quickly losing patience with her reaper butler.

“Oh sure! You are the very model of a modern major-mother, aren’t you? You’re _always_ there for him when he needs you, just like a mother should be. You keep him safe from those who want to predate on him, don’t you? You did so tonight, you kept him safe from that Viscount who wanted to sell him into sexual slavery, yes I remember when you did that!” 

“Shut up! I didn’t know anything like that would happen!”

“Yes, what a wonderful mother Angelina Dalles is. You live in another house days away from him, just like a mother does! You let him rub shoulders with demons and criminals and cultists, just like a mother does! You let him carry the burden of a corporation and an earlship and a royal commission and whatever other bullshit he’s up to all alone, just like a real mom would!”

“Stop it, Grelle! Just stop!”

“Gee, I wish you were my mother, Madam Red. It’s such a shame your shriveled little womb had to pop clean out of you huh. How I wish I could have been the ugly child to crawl out of it.”

Angelina moved to slap Grelle but she caught her wrist and twisted it back harshly. Angelina cried out and was forced to the ground to avoid the worst of the pain. 

“Don’t act like you’re the only person who’s had their motherhood taken from them,” Grelle snarled inches from her face. Eventually some of her steam evaporated. Angelina just knelt there and Grelle let go before reaching into her coat to pull out her Death Scythe. “Angelina, darling. We have some truly noble work to attend to. I won't allow us to be stopped by some braindead patrician. You aristocrats are all the same, no drive, no vision, no follow through. All you have is aesthetics and even that you didn’t earn. I hate seeing children die but if killing the brat is what I need to do to keep you focused on our goal then I’ll do it.”

“No, please,” Angelina began before being cut off as Grelle poked the tip of her Death Scythe towards her face.

“It’s you or him, Angelina. You or him,” Grelle said, revving her Death Scythe as emphasis. “You’re no use to me if you’re just another woman.”

“Fine,” she said looking down at the floor, “if it comes to it, I’ll do it myself.”

“Good, I’m glad we understand each other,” Grelle said, turning to the door before sighing and looking back over her shoulder. “I had a nice roquefort and port picked out, but you serve yourself tonight. Make your own bed, light your own fires. I have real friends _,_ Madam Red _,_ I’d rather go spend my time with them than be your toady.”

* * *

Grelle had snuck onto the Phantomhive Estate and was lounging in the garden, sat upon some topiary, tempting fate as she was want to do. She absentmindedly filed at her nails, dreaming up ways to get into either Will or Bassie’s pants when she realized someone was nearby. Had been nearby for a while. Had been addressing her for a while.

“Huh?” she said eyes focusing on the little fancy boy. 

“Nevermind...” he replied, looking particularly forlorn for a moment before turning away to sulk. “What are you doing on my property, Grelle?”

“Oh yes, the land you worked so hard to buy. You fucking idiot. You utter moron.”

“What?” Ciel said, cheeks turning red at the series of bald-faced insults.

“Why don’t you go and call Bassie, I would love to have a tussle with him,” Grelle sang, playfully arching her back and pulling out her Death Scythe to wiggle it around in the air.

“No, I don’t think I will.”

“Aw, you’re never any fun, are you?” she said. There was a long silence before Ciel responded. A long tortuous silence that she felt strangely compelled to not break.

“No,” he finally said, voice somber and melancholy, “I’m not. I’m not very much fun at all.” That was not what Grelle was expecting and she didn’t really know what to say to that. “Why did you kill my aunt?”

“Well, I’ll be honest,” Grelle started idly rubbing Angelina’s coat between her thumb and forefinger, “I was going to kill all three of you. I blame my own engineering oversight. That trick with the coat exploited an obvious design flaw any decent maker should have caught.” The boy looked at her with confusion and loathing and she tried to continue in a way that might satisfy him, if only to get him to leave her alone. “I suppose I killed her because I hated that she said you were like a son to her.

“I hated that she called you her son, because if you were then she was a terrible mother. And,” Grelle couldn’t believe she was going to say this but what the hell, “I think you deserve a good family just like all children… even if you’re kind of an awful brat. I think you deserve to have a happy life.”

“I… deserve to be happy?”

“I don’t know, kiddo. Probably?”

She’d go on to meet with him in the garden many more times. Ciel would tell Grelle feelings that she was certain he’d never tell anyone else, and it felt nice to her, for some odd reason. Nice for her to have this brat she didn’t care about vent his feelings. And he kept coming back to her because she gave him little glimpses of hope and love that she knew he could never find anywhere else.

And when she was compelled to give him advice, what she said was some bullshit. But she felt it was true, and that was what mattered.

* * *

“ _My son now, Angelina,_ ” Grelle muttered to herself pulling her chair up to where Ciel sat in their dark lonely corner in the belly of the ocean liner. “This is going to hurt, a lot,” she added.

“I’ll scream,” the kid replied. Oh, what a badass Grelle had tied herself to.

“No you won't, the last thing we need someone to hear and call the constable,” she said, jamming the wooden toy soldier into his mouth. She leaned in close enough to see what she was actually doing and held the blade up to his pretty purple eye. “Are you ready?” The kiddo looked a proper mess and as he swallowed hard, nodding, he began weeping before hyperventilating. “That doesn’t look like ready. Here,” she said, refreshing the vodka in her glass, “drink this, it’ll help.”

It was a dangerous idea, giving this kid alcohol. He was so depressive and prone to self destructive behavior, Grelle knew better than most how alcoholism could destroy a person, a family. But as it stood it was the only anesthetic she had beyond knocking the kid out and she really didn’t want it to come to that. She’d need to make sure to keep him away from the drink after they got through this.

Giving her son straight vodka, just like a mom does. _My son now, Angelina._

She smirked at her own joke before trying to turn the smirk into a reassuring smile. To his credit, the kid drank the whole thing in one go, like he ought to. She had nowhere that level of resolve at his age. Although he did look sick and she rushed to get him a glass of cold milk. Milk was what a kid his age should be drinking. It let her pretend like she was a normal mom and he was a normal kid.

He ran his hands over his dress and they sat in silence. It was a cute dress on him, she hoped she was right about him being like her. If he wasn’t then it wouldn’t make much of a difference. Little boys still deserved happy lives just as much as little girls did. She scooted back over to him when he started swaying in his chair.

“Are you ready now? The flush in your cheeks says so.”

“As I’ll ever be- Wait! Does the flush in my cheeks make me look pretty?” he asked. Yeah, Grelle was pretty sure that whatever this kid was, it wasn’t the boy lord Ciel Phantomhive. 

“Very pretty, Ciel. Now hold very still,” Grelle said as she leaned back in. She gripped his hair to hold him still and popped the wooden soldier back into his mouth. It really would be a shame, his purple eye was very pretty. That Viscount guy was right about that, even if he was just the absolute worst. She was glad she took the time to off him earlier that morning before meeting Ciel to board this ship. She was just protecting her son, like a mom does, like Angelina should have done that night. _My son now, Angelina._

Without further ado she incised him and he wriggled in pain. She felt bad in a way she never had in her life, but there was no backing out now. Oh, but it was awful watching a child suffer. Her child. Her son. 

All Grelle could think was: “Just like a mom.” She started giggling gleefully at the thought, unable to control herself. 

She was cutting open her son’s eye, just like a mom did. 

She couldn’t stop giggling. And laughing. And crying.


	9. They Have Their Exits

“Happy birthday, Ciel,” she whispered to herself when the clock over the fireplace struck midnight. 

“What was that?” came the voice of the family’s father from his easy chair.

“Oh nothing, just it’s my… brother’s birthday today,” she replied. It was also her birthday. Another year older. Another year further from the fire. Another year wiser? Definitely, another year wiser. The person she was even a year ago was someone with a deep abiding juvenility. That boy was someone thoroughly trapped in his own head. She was glad to be someone else.

“Aw, well congratulations, sugar. How old is he turning?” asked the mother bringing in a small tray of biscuits and hot cocoa from the kitchen. Ros didn’t have the heart to tell her that he was dead.

“Ten,” she technically wasn’t lying. “If I leave early enough tomorrow I might be able to see him.” That was a lie. No matter what happened she’d never see Ciel again, she knew it in her bones. Either of the Ciels.

“T’aint right for a pretty young thing like you to be traveling out here all alone. We been havin’ rustlers in these parts. And worse, I reckon,” said the eldest son, the only of the couple’s five children to stay up with them by the fire. He was about her age actually, and was full of a fiery spirit that his parents lacked. That, and a keen interest in Rosalind which made sense, he probably didn’t see many girls out here in the middle of the Mojave. Probably none as pretty as Ros, if she might be so bold as to claim. She appreciated that Grelle had included makeup in her many escape bags, being as much of a necessity in the woman’s eyes as food or shelter.

“Easy now, Jebediah. T’aint our place to question the parentin’ choices of her father, neither. Here in America a man is given to raisen his children the way he sees fit. If he trusts his daughter to travel alone, we gotta respect that,” said the father, finishing by taking a long drag off of his cigar. 

“Sorry, papa,” the son replied.

Her birthday meant that it was the anniversary of her parent’s deaths amongst other things. Or… yes, they died that day as far as she was concerned. Now she was spending it with another family. A very different family from her own. They were ranchers, not aristocrats. They had different goals and dreams and sensibilities from her family but there were still similarities. A father was a father, a mother was a mother, a brother was a brother. If she squinted her eye she might even pretend she was with her real family again.

She took a mug of cocoa and gingerly sipped at it. Ros remembered the time she and Grelle had faced Sebastian together on the train and the way Grelle had said she wished she could have given her hot cocoa. It was a little late but she was still glad to have it. It was cold outside. Deserts get cold at night, especially in the winter. That was something she had been surprised to learn. Her first few nights out here alone had been hell. She had never been camping before and would have frozen to death if not for the hospitality of people like the family in whose home she was currently a guest. The cocoa wasn’t very strong. It was creamy but it was nothing like the hot milk with cocoa powder Mey-Rin would prepare during the winter in the Phantomhive estate. Ros seemed to leave corpses of loved ones in her wake. She hoped this family wouldn’t join them.

There were times when she considered just laying down and letting the demon catch up to her. If only to keep her life from bringing about any more misery to others. She wondered if that would count as a suicide and she’d be forced into service as a psychopomp like Grelle had been. She was pretty sure Sebastian got first dibs on her soul when she died regardless of how it happened. The one wrench in that plan was Grelle. She had sacrificed so much so she could live and the thought of giving up in spite of all her mother had done for her was simply out of the question.

The biscuits were tasty though, and she munched on them while the son tried his best to chat her up. He was pleasant company, the whole family was. Still, it was late, and she was tired. She thanked the parents for their hospitality once again, and the father asked the son to show her the guest room. It was small, and clearly doubled as a storage room, but it looked cozy. She thanked him at the door and he cleared his throat when she turned to go inside.

“Miss Rosalind, I know what my papa said and all. But if you need someone to ride with ya. Well, we’ve been needing a few accountremants from town. I'm sure I could convince him to let me accompany you for a day or two.” He was charming enough and friendly to boot. She had been lonely the last couple days traveling alone, in reality the first time she’d been truly alone since she met Sebastian. Being alone with her own thoughts was tougher now than it ever was. More than anything she was worried about disappointing him. She didn’t know if she liked boys or anything still. It just was never a good time to think about that stuff.

She looked at him, he was towheaded and had a soft boyish face. She imagined him holding her, kissing her. She might have felt something. She might have not felt anything. Maybe it was the kind of thing you had to try before you knew if you liked it or not. 

“I’ll think about it,” she said, and she meant it.

She had trouble sleeping, terrible trouble, worse than normal. She had already awoken with a cold sweat from her nightmare and had been laying in bed when she heard a commotion from outside. She sprung out of bed so fast she got light headed and stumbled into a pile of boxes shoulder first. She could feel bad about knocking them over later, right now she had to get out of there. She had been sleeping in her underwear since she lacked any pajamas, so she pulled on her dark tan jodhpurs and black riding boots before sliding her arms into her burgundy wool riding coat and finishing up by pinning her knit shawl together with a broach. She grabbed the saddle bag she brought in and opened the door to hear yelling. 

“It’s them damn rustlers again, Jed!” came the voice of the father. She made it to the living room where she saw him throwing his son a Winchester rifle before cocking his own and turning to head out the front door into the dark night.

“Rosalind, go back to your room, we’ll handle this,” the son said before cocking his own rifle and following after his father. She didn’t and instead trailed after them out onto the porch and into the field. She nabbed a lantern that had been left on the railing. They didn’t seem to notice her as she slipped off to rendezvous with Santa Fe Sunrise, the appaloosa gelding she bought in Riverside on her way out of Los Angeles. He was sleeping and she felt awful about waking him up, but she did anyway, throwing her saddle on him and attaching the bridal as quickly as she could.

She was leading him out of the stable when she heard the first gunshot. She didn’t want to stay around long. It was dangerous to ride at night, but if it wasn’t just rustlers then she couldn’t stay here. If it wasn’t just rustlers then maybe her fleeing might save Jebediah and his father. Damn it all, she really thought she might have taken him up on his offer too. 

Sante Fe whinnied and spooked at the sound of another gunshot. She hopped onto his back and took off to the North-East. She navigated as best she could through the low sparse forest of joshua trees.

She wouldn’t find out if it was just rustlers or not. She wouldn’t look back. She couldn’t.

* * *

The St. George Tabernacle was very unlike any church Rosalind had ever been in before. Though she would have to admit she hadn’t set foot in many churches outside of those she had been bound to by duty. On the surface it seemed like any other American red bricked church, albiet the sheer Americanness of the archiecture was queer in and of itself to Rosalind, even now. But there were many ways in which it was subtly off, like an uncanny copy. It was to standard Protestant churches what the orchid mantis was to orchids. She worried if that meant she was a fly about to be eaten.

Most glaringly different was the way a single blue eye looked down on the assembled masses from above the choir where a cross would ordinarily be. She figured it was supposed to be the eye of the Heavenly Father but in it she couldn’t see God. She couldn’t be quite so sure exactly what that eye reminded her of. It sort of looked like her own blue right eye. Her original eye, before the glass one and before the contract. Her childhood eye. Her past self was watching her, always watching and judging. What would that child think of her now? She couldn’t even begin to imagine. 

The interior was packed and Ros could only find seating near the back. She prefered it lest she need to make a hasty egress. The hymn swelled and many around her joined in. Even with the hymnbook before her she didn’t know the words. Try as she might to read the words they simply didn’t make sense to her.

She knew nothing of God or his Heavenly Kingdom. She thought she should want to, now that she was free of the demon’s direct influence. She thought she ought to desire a redeemed soul, but she looked at the words of the hymn and felt nothing. No warm love coursed through her, no revelation or divine understanding. She was no longer a demon’s chattel, but she was not a child of the Heavenly Father either. She was just Ros.

She figured that was for the best. She thought back on Grelle’s admission that she longed to purify her. That, and the fallen angel’s designs on her soul. She would seek her own path to purity. She stood up knowing that she’d find no solace here.

It was Christmas eve, and no one seemed to pay attention to the small dark haired girl as she left the hall. There was snow lightly carpeting the flat red mountains outside. She stood there and fumbled with the broach of her shawl. She remembered that the shawl was an early birthday present. She supposed it would need to serve as an early Christmas present as well. She wondered if she’d ever get another gift from anyone. 

She thought about the Christmas she never got to have after her tenth birthday. She remembered going into the city with her mother to go Christmas shopping before the fire. She had picked out a gift for Ciel. She couldn’t remember what it was exactly, but she did remember how excited she had been to give it to him. She remembered the way she imagined his eyes would lighting up when he finally opened it.

No, it wasn’t her own eye, she realized, looking back in through the open doors. It was Ciel’s eye looking down at her from Heaven, or Hell, or wherever he was. 

“I have nothing for you this year, big brother. Maybe next.”

* * *

The water looked fast and deep and Leslie said they’d need to go further up river before they’d find a proper crossing. Andre immediately spoke up to try and contradict his sibling claiming that they’d be able to ford it here just fine. The man had a down right nasty personality and creeped Ros out in new and exciting ways the more she learned about him. She would have taken Leslie alone as a guide across the desert to Reno if they didn’t both seem to come as a package deal. She found herself really liking the long haired cowpoke and felt a kindred spirit with her. She wasn’t a hundred percent sure of Leslie’s gender, but she looked like a woman and acted like a woman and talked about herself as a woman. Still, Andre referred to her as his little brother and Leslie never seemed to protest or correct him. 

“Big bro, now wait just a moment, you know I believe in you, right? I trust you, but don’t you think, this might just be not the right place,” she said. Leslie wore a heavy forest green tunic and had long red hair that reminded Ros of Grelle. Her face was pouty and expressive with luscious red lips, and she always seemed to be grinning, even when she wasn’t happy, which was rarely.

“You idiot, why are you such an idiot? This is fine,” Andre said as he led his apprehensive horse into the water, “See? Fine.” Andre wore a similar forest green outfit with a vest and a riding cap. He had black hair and a series of freckles that almost formed a pattern of intersecting lines across his face.

“Oh wow, look at you go big bro, you’re really doing it! Crossing the river!” Leslie called out after him. Almost immediately the current swept him off his horse and he was gone. Leslie screamed: **“Big bro!”** and took off at a gallop after his thrashing body bobbed up to the surface twenty yards down river. 

Rosalind just sat there on Santa Fe Sunrise wondering if she would have ended up like Leslie under any possible course of events. Was that how their relationship would have been if Ciel was still a part of her life? It seemed a laughable thought but then again, maybe. She urged her gelding down the river bank at a trot following after her shrieks. Eventually Ros caught up to her to see her pulling her brother out of the river face down across a stoney shore. 

“Big bro, you gotta breathe, okay! I need you to unflat your nostrils, okay!” she said in a loud clear voice after she flipped him over. He sputtered. Rosalind was more worried about the water’s temperature than the possibility of drowning. It was late February and the water coming down off of the mountains was probably icy cold. On top of that the air was brisk and would only get colder once evening arrived.

Ros climbed down off of Santa Fe and started gathering some kindling for a fire. She didn’t particularly care for the man, but Leslie loved him, and Leslie was like her. Grelle had shown her that girls like them were worth sticking up for, no matter what. She really did love her stupid asshole brother, didn’t she. There was just something special about families.

After assembling the kindling in an appropriate place on the stoney shore Ros struck a match and blew on the small flame to stoke it brighter until it was big enough to survive on its own. Only once it was big enough did she leave it alone to gather more firewood. A few weeks ago she’d have been wholly incapable of starting a fire, so she allowed herself a moment of pride in her competency. Andre seemed more than able to breathe on his own despite Leslie’s constant reminders. Ros explained to her why she set the fire and that Andre needed to get out of his wet clothes. Leslie nodded and grinned and commented profusely on just how smart Rosalind was.

They camped out there on that stoney shore for the next couple hours burning daylight. Thankfully it looked like his horse, now without a rider, had made the right call; deciding to stay on this side of the river, following after the pack.

The one positive of the delay was that Andre seemed too indisposed with his shivering cold wet body to open his annoying mouth, and Rosalind could enjoy the company of his sibling uninterrupted. Thankfully it seemed like Leslie’s foolish nature was limited to her interactions with her brother, because she had some insightful ideas about their course and the best way to avoid most of the harsher parts of winter. Everyone is a fool for the people they love, it seemed.

Also without Andre to interrupt or mislead her Ros could finally ask her something she’d been wanting to since they first met.

“You’re a woman right, Leslie?”

“Ehh?” she replied, her grin falling from one of joy to one of confusion. She poked at her chin with her pointer finger and looked up at the sky. “Well, I reckon so, but I figured the stork might have mixed me up terrible when he brought me to my daddy and big bro. I’ve felt like I ought to have been a girl all my life, but dang it, if Christ didn’t endow me with the wrong kinda body parts.”

“Yeah, I understand. I’m the same way, actually,” Ros confided. Leslie’s eyes lit up and she bounced up and down in excitement.

“That is so cool! I ain’t never met someone else like me. This is powerful validatin’.”

“Yeah you’d be surprised how many girls like us there are,” Ros said. She thought about Grelle and her friends in dispatch. “You don’t need to put up with Andre treating you like that,” she added, pointing to the shivering man in his bedroll by the fire.

“Ah, big bro might call me a boy but he’ll always protect me something fierce when someone tries to put me down for bein’ a pansy. He’s so noble.”

Ros severely doubted his nobility. But then again, she had known nobility itself to be far more ignoble.

* * *

Astoria was a pretty little city in early May. Visually, at the very least, it was beautiful. Trees were growing fresh leaves and flowers were in bloom. The sunlight lit up the subtle peaks of the Columbia like tinsel. Neat little rows of whitewashed buildings, carriages full of goods being bussed around, gentlemen and ladies going about their day in pretty Victorian dress.

However, the city stunk to high heavens. The fisheries and canaries were up wind and bathed the entire little town in the stench of decaying fish. The salty air off of the Pacific could barely keep up. As pretty as the town was, it couldn’t mask the rot; there was something inside it that was broken. The city and the state, and country, and her, all carried baggage underneath the surface.

Rosalind rode down the central avenue of the city getting the lay of the land. She noticed a small farmer's market down a side road and headed towards it. Santa Fe Sunrise had been a loyal and dutiful steed these past months and she thought she might get him an apple or carrot in thanks. She dismounted and tied him to an iron hitching post. She passed by stalls selling furs and crafts, more selling fresh produce from the Willamette Valley. She bought a few root vegetables for Sante Fe and continued down the row of sellers with mild curiosity.

One booth caught her eye the moment it came into view. Unlike the others which sold an eclectic group of produce this one had only one product: cherries. Cherries from the newly established Washington state. More cherries than she’d ever seen in her life, more of any one kind of fruit she’d ever seen. The booth was double wide and still crates upon crates filled to the brim with cherries were stacked one over another, topped by wicker baskets that were all but overflowing with cherries. Not just in their natural form either. They had cherry preserves, cherry jam, cherry pies and tarts, cherry juice, dried cherries, cherry pit oil, and even more esoteric cherry products as indicated by the pricing sign.

She had never seen so much red in one place.

A girl behind the table called out to the crowd, advertising their wares, and locked eyes with Ros and gave her a big smile. She had relatively short hair, dark brown bordering on auburn, and she wore a simple faded pink dress with a white smock that was stained red with what Rosalind could only imagine was cherry juice. 

“Young lady,” she started despite the fact that she could hardly be a year older than Ros, “have you heard of the myriad of health benefits cherries can offer? Wow! Surely a girl as truly gorgeous as yourself must already use cherries in your daily beauty routine!” It didn’t sound to Ros like regular salesman flattery. If she didn’t know any better she might think this girl was coming onto her. Still, flattery could get anyone anywhere with Rosalind Whitechapel as she’d found out to her chagrin. A lifetime of never being called pretty would do that to a girl.

She cautiously approached the cherry girl.

“You’ve never had cherries like ours, I guarantee you. Juicier than a mulled wine, firmer than a crisp apple, sweeter than a cube of sugar. Please try some,” she said holding out a small handful of freshly washed scarlet cherries. Rosalind took them and popped one into her mouth. “Though I doubt they could be half as sweet as you,” the cherry girl added, with a subtle smirk. Ros’ face grew hot and she nearly spit out the cherry as she chewed it. She didn’t want to though, they really were sweet as a sugar cube. That meant this girl wasn’t lying, so she probably wasn’t lying about thinking she was beautiful either. Ros spit the pit into a little bowl the girl had on the table and stammered trying to think of a proper response.

“I’ll uhh… take a box!” she ultimately managed to get out. 

“Tell you what, I’ll throw in a jar of our cherry facial scrub, not that you need it… _if_ you meet me by the pier later tonight to watch the sunset,” she said slyly leaning her body forward towards Rosalind. Ros didn’t know what to think, she felt like her brain was short circuiting. She had never watched the sun set over the pacific, and she wanted to. She wanted to have a friend too, but this girl surely wanted more than just friendship like that rancher boy in the Mojave. Did she like girls? She always thought she was supposed to like girls and thinking about her relationship to liking girls made her sad. 

Every time she looked into this girl's face all she could see was Lizzy’s. All she could think about was how her engagement to Elizabeth had been arranged for a boy that she had never even truly been. She didn’t know if she could love a girl while not being that boy. She didn’t know if she could ever love a girl and not have that boy creep back inside of her. Rosalind, the girl that she was, was too fresh, too new, too fragile. If she tested those limits prematurely she might shatter like a glass songbird. Then where would she be?

“I’ll take the scrub, I think, but… I’ll be paying for it with cash today I’m afraid,” she said. To her credit the cherry girl seemed to take the rejection in stride and never stopped smiling as she processed the transaction.

* * *

It had been one year since the day Rosalind had boarded the steam ship to America, and to celebrate she had splurged a little on the fanciest hotel in Seattle. Truth be told, she really shouldn’t be spending all this money. Her escape funds were running really thin and she was dreading the day she’d need to seriously evaluate her spending and find a steady source of income. It was just that now she intimately knew how the other classes lived, so spending time in luxury was all the more luxurious.

She drew some hot water and picked out a few different bath oils that seemed interesting to her. Lavender and rosemary were the most enticing choices, but she was also keen on some meyer lemon and even a dash of persimmon. She also found a small paper bag of dried rose petals which she sprinkled across the foaming surface. She was drawing her own bath, she realized. She could do so much on her own now that she never thought she’d be able to do before. Some of it was such simple stuff, but she still marveled at how distant that life she had lived was to her.

The tub was big, and even though the ornate tiled bathroom was big too it still managed to fill the place out. It was just about getting full so she disrobed and sunk her sore body into it. Months on horseback, finding shelter where she could, had taken its toll on her body and she didn’t realize just how exhausted she’d been until that moment.

There was a large window that had a wonderful view of Puget Sound. She looked out of it for a while but eventually her eyes got tired and she closed them, settling into the fragrant bath. Eyes, she only had one eye. Her eye got tired. How quickly did she lose herself in the fantasy of Rosalind.

It was just a fantasy after all. Being a girl, being free, being happy. Rosalind was just another fake identity, as false as Celia had been, as false as Ciel had been. Was that why she eschewed all companionship? She was afraid letting someone in close would let them see the cracks, all the little inconsistencies in her alibi. If someone got too close they’d see that she was never a real person. Just a scarecrow. Stuffed with what exactly?

  
  


Who are you really, Astre Phantomhive?

  
  


But all life was a dream. Perhaps she’d wake up soon and it would be her tenth birthday. Or she’d be a frog or a butterfly or a rock or something she couldn’t even begin to understand.

If she pretended to be a person hard enough, really pretended she was the pure sweet sinless unbroken thing she wanted to be, she’d just become it oneday. If she became as good of an actor at being Rosalind as she had been at being Ciel, as she had been at being Astre; if she became as good of an actor at being a girl as she had been at being a boy, then was there really any difference? Would anyone know her from the real thing beyond what she had underneath the surface of this carpet of rose petals?

But she’d know, and she’d still have to see this body in the mirror every day. If she ever did want a rancher’s son or cherry girl in her life it wouldn’t be something she could keep hidden forever from them. And them knowing and her knowing would make it not real.

She deserved to be happy. She had to remember that. That was a fundamental truth of the universe. She had to recontextualize her body and rewrite her truth. She was who she was, and she was a girl, ergo her body was a girl’s body. The logic was impenetrable.

She sunk deeper into the tub and let her mind wander and drift around to nothing in particular. Maybe tomorrow she’d find a good bookstore and purchase a novel to keep her company. She had enough money to get tickets to a play, she saw that there were some neat things playing in town. So much life to live, even on her own. Even alone.

There was a brisk knock at the door to her hotel room and she sat up in the tub. She wasn’t expecting any room service.


	10. To Ashes; To Dust

Rosalind dried herself off and slipped back into the hotel’s bathrobe.

She dimly realized looking down that her hands were shaking. For some reason all she could think about was how soft her skin looked. The bath oils really did work their magic. She felt soft. 

She looked over at her eye floating in a glass of water in the corner. She decided to leave it there.

She walked out of the bathroom and closed the door behind her, before walking to the door to her hotel room. She took a deep breath and looked through the aperture.

She didn’t recognize the figure on the other side at first, but after a moment she realized it was Grelle. At least someone or something that vaguely resembled Grelle.

Whomever it was had longer hair than Rosalind remembered Grelle having. They were also several weeks unshaven, very unlike Grelle who had always kept her face cleanly shaven and powdered to avoid any five o’clock shadow. Their facial hair was most thick along their sideburns and had a much brighter color than the rest of their hair. A light mousy brown that bordered, not on red exactly, but almost orange. The most striking difference was the way they had their left eye and a good portion of their upper face covered with a white bandage that they tucked under their hair.

They had on a black suit with a long black overcoat that they wore over one shoulder, not unlike the one she had worn when that night Ros had found out she and her aunt were Jack the Ripper. In their exposed hand they held a walking cane, it was the only thing about them that didn’t look weathered. That and their expression. As different as they looked in so many regards they did have that indefinitely risible Grelle grin plastered on their face. Although it looked more like a smirk or a grimace as their eye darted over the door, clearly contemplating if they should knock again.

Should she open the door? Did it matter? Sebastian wasn’t a vampire, if he wanted to come in and grab her he could. Did that prove this was Grelle? 

“Who’s there?” she called out through the door, shaky hands hovering over the lock.

“Who do you think, Kiddo? Though I do suppose a lady’s seen better days.”

“I don’t believe you,” Ros started, before elaborating, “I don’t believe you’re alive,” she couldn’t let herself believe that Grelle wasn’t gone forever.

“Oh, I’m very much still dead, darling,” the figure said in a sing-song voice, peering at the aperture trying to see if they could catch a glimpse of Rosalind through it. Ros closed her eye, and counted to five before opening it again. They were still there, so they weren’t an apparition. 

She couldn’t let herself believe that Grelle wasn’t gone, but why? Why was she so averse to accepting this one truth that would make her happy? Even after she had decided to choose happiness it still was her habit to default away from it. Letting yourself be happy was a process it seemed. 

If it were Sebastian then, what did it matter anyway? Fat lot of good running would do with him this close. Her hand stopped shaking.

“Just give me a shred more evidence that it’s really you,” she said almost as a formality, she was fully ready to open the door regardless.

“Hmm,” they stood there for a moment mulling it over. “You asked me who I was earlier. Well, I believe my name is Iamb Jhack Theripper.”

Rosalind threw open the door wide and took her in. It had been quite some time and she seemed smaller than Ros remembered somehow. She looked even more haggard not through the aperture. Ros just stood there and so did Grelle. Eventually she took a probing step towards the hotel room as though to ask if she could come in. Rosalind squeaked and moved out of the way to let her through. 

Grelle walked past her, putting her cane and overcoat on a nearby coat rack. Without the overcoat it was obvious from the way her left sleeve was folded and pinned that she was still without an arm. She saw the way Rosalind was staring and spoke up.

“Yeah, bastard got me pretty good, I’d show you the worst of it but I’d think it rather inappropriate for a lady to expose herself like that. Ah, and of course Bassy did very little to heed my pleas against attacking my face,” she said, indicating the bandages covering her eye. Upon closer inspection Ros could see a few scratch marks poking out from under the bandage. The flesh looked like it hadn’t gotten the proper chance to heal and was still red and raw. “He did end up taking my left eye,” Grelle continued giving a tired but genuine smile in Ros’ direction. “So that’s neat, we match now, more or less. I suppose put together we have one proper pair between us.” She squinted and leaned forward. “By the way, just what are you wearing, Ros? Ros!? Oof!”

Rosalind ran up to her and nearly tackled her into a tight hug. It was so strange the way Grelle was acting, as though it hadn’t been over half a year since they’d seen each other. As though Ros hadn’t written her off as having been gone for good.

She seemed surprised for a moment but quickly took to tussling Ros’ hair with her right hand.

“I missed you too, slugger.”

* * *

Ros got properly dressed while she waited for Grelle to fetch them something to eat. She returned pushing a serving cart that carried some delicious looking cucumber sandwiches, cookies, and a pot of tea that she said she had brought for old time’s sake. 

“I promise you it won’t be so terribly weak this time.”

It was weak, but then again she couldn’t really see how much tea she had scooped into the pot, and even if she had, Ros doubted she’d bothered to ever learn the proper ratios. They sat about in the suite’s small drawing room catching up. Grelle clearly had something big she wanted to talk to her about and yet she was being cagey, instead telling her about her misadventures and inquiring after Ros’ own. 

Grelle herself hadn’t actually been on quite the adventure that Ros had. She spent a lot of her time in hiding, trying to lose Sebastian and the Californian Dispatch, who had been alerted to her presence by the subsequent battle with the aforementioned demon.

“Did you find any of the attractive Californian men you set out to amongst their Dispatch?” Ros asked, taking a bite of another perfectly triangular cucumber sandwich.

“Hardly,” Grelle scoffed. She ran her hand over her scruffy chin, before scratching it with her untrimmed nails. It seemed like an absentminded habit she’d developed. Ros was thankful she’d never have to grow facial hair. “I didn’t get to see any of them, none of them ever got close enough. All I did was spend my time in hiding trying to figure out…” she trailed off, before quickly changing the subject. “So you were in a Mormon Tabernacle over Christmas, right? Was it weird? Did you meet any polygamists?”

“Grelle, what is it that you have to tell me?” Ros asked plainly, as businesslike as she’d ever been. She liked catching up with Grelle, but even after her promise to keep from withholding information from her, Grelle still required a little probing.

“Well, I...” she started reaching underneath the tablecloth on the serving tray and pulling out a worn looking doctor’s bag. She placed it on the empty space between the pot of earl grey and sugar cookies, working her thumb to unhitch the hook that bound it closed but going no further with it and not rising from her chair. “I spent a long time theorizing how it might be that Sebastian was able to find you, even with everything we had done to make you untraceable, even with the techniques I employed. Believe me Ros, figuring these kinds of things out isn’t easy for me. I was never particularly astute or given towards problem solving. I’m sorry…” she said trailing off. Ros waited for her to continue.

“In full disclosure, Ros, during these last few months I knew where you were, I could have reconnected with you at any point. But I wanted to be sure I had something for you when I arrived. I wanted to give you the promise of a safe life, and I didn’t think it might be one I could keep until now.” 

She didn’t fully process it at first; the revelation came in waves. She had been alone all this time and she could have not been. She could have had her mom with her.

“You left me, alone,” she said, it wasn’t a question and she said it dryly without malice. She wasn’t mad, not really. She wasn’t exactly sure what the news made her feel, other than curious.

“It is a great evil of a mother to abandon her daughter, I don’t expect forgiveness. But, I do hope you understand. I had to be sure. I needed time to put the pieces together, to know what I had to do, so that I could fulfill my duty.” With a sigh she reached back under the tablecloth of the serving tray and pulled out a bottle of rubbing alcohol that she set next to the open doctor’s bag. 

“What are you talking about?” Ros inquired, hand unconsciously moving to her glass eye, back in its socket. 

“You carry a chain, Rosalind. It weighs you down everywhere you go. You don’t even realize it.” Grelle’s eye looked towards her unfocused and tired, sad almost. “To anyone else it would have been apparent from the first day, but unfortunately you had to be saddled with the ditziest reaper in all of the English dispatch,” she joked, barely lightening the mood in the slightest. Rosalind didn’t say anything, and let a short silence linger urging Grelle to continue. Eventually she asked: “You bear a mark upon your flesh, do you not?” 

“A… a mark?” Rosalind asked, confused.

“Upon the small of your back, on your left side,” she elaborated. Ros’ hand went to the spot Grelle had specified. She felt nothing there.

“I don't know what you mean,” she said, concern growing inside her.

“The brand of the cult, the mark of the noble beast. It’s how the demon can find you. It’s the umbilical cord that ties you to Ciel,” Grelle said. Ros didn’t know just which Ciel she had meant, but she also didn’t think it mattered either way.

The brand, of course. 

She remembered the searing hot pain in her lower back. She remembered remembering that pain.

How could she have ever forgotten?

But she knew exactly how she could have forgotten.

During all her time as Ciel Phantomhive the brand had always been in the back of her mind. She would always feel its presence, not a moment would go by that its oppressive weight wouldn’t bare down on her. 

But ever since she renounced that life it had been gone like so many other shackles that tied her to her once inescapable fate. Not once since she uttered the name Celia into existence had the brand’s existence crossed into her mind.

Only it was never really gone, was it? Even as she lived a true life, it was still there, on her back, even if she could never see it.

That was why she needed Grelle, why she couldn’t be alone. Because sometimes, and in fact quite often, one needs someone else to realize how immersed one is in their own pain. 

Like explaining water to a fish. 

“But,” Grelle said, finally rising, “Even though your trauma isn’t, that mark is only skin deep.” She reached into the bag and started pulling out several surgery knives, bandages, needles, thread, and cylindrical glasses that she filled with the rubbing alcohol.

“Well, what are we waiting for then?” Rosalind said, more than a little of her sapped confidence having been restored by Grelle’s return.

There was a stiff table in the drawing room and Rosalind found herself laying atop it as Grelle worked at sharpening the knives she’d chosen for the procedure. Ros discarded her dress, not wanting to get any blood upon it, but thankfully the fireplace kept the room toasty and warm. It looked like Grelle had discarded her coat as well, along with her tie and everything besides her white dress shirt. She never did mind getting blood on her clothes, did she? It was all the red.

“Are you sure about this?” Grelle asked of her, as she soaked some scissors to disinfect them. Ros believed she already knew the answer.

“Oh, more than certain,” she replied.

“This will hurt,” Grelle said, a sly smile forming on her face.

“I’ll cry.”

“Yes. Yes you will.”

There was the sudden cold dry feeling of a rag drenched in rubbing alcohol being wiped across the offending skin. It was funny to think that she didn’t even want to take one last look of it in the mirror before it was gone forever. The mark and everything it represented was so far below her now. She was so much more. Grelle let the alcohol dissipate before slowly and gingerly beginning her first incision. 

It wasn’t the worst pain she had ever experienced by far. Even still, she passed out from it, as a proper Victorian girl ought to.

* * *

My daughter now.

Grelle finished up the last of the skin graft before quickly wiping down the wound and covering it with sterile bandages. She plopped down exhausted into the nearby easy chair.

It had certainly not been an easy year for her and she let more than a little of her exhaustion flow out of her into the cushions. It hadn’t been an easy existence at all, nor had her immediate task of performing ammature surgery been easy. Especially with only one arm. Even after all this time she still wasn’t used to it.

Thankfully from this seat she could still reach Rosalind and pet gently at her head. She took in her daughter, it was therapeutic, it had been far too long since she had seen her. She looked peaceful in that moment. The way Grelle always wanted to see her, the way she hoped she would see her for the rest of her life.

Suddenly Grelle realized she hadn’t sutured or even bandaged the place on her body from whence the donated tissue came. Her hand went to her lower stomach, right next to the scar of the bullet she had taken for Ros was the patch of raw flesh where she had taken her skin to substitute for Rosalind’s own. She’d need to cover the wound soon, but for now all she wanted to do was sit here and tousle Rosalind’s hair like she hadn’t been able too for so long. 

Grelle had given life unto Rosalind from her own body. Her own flesh would nurture her and keep her safe as she grew into the woman she was meant to be.

Just like a mother does.

* * *

It was seven pm and time for Whitechapel Toy Co. to close up shop for the night. As Rosalind flipped the sign over to read: “Closed” on the window by the door a hurried looking young woman with short auburn hair burst through to a cacophony of door jingles.

Rosalind just stared at her for a moment as the ringing of the doorbells subsided. She suddenly remembered her customer service etiquette, brushing down her apron and cute little shop dress, putting on a big friendly smile.

“Hi, welcome in, how can we help you today?” she asked, tilting her head to the side cheerfully.

“I’m so very sorry,” the woman started, obviously very flustered, “I know that you’re about to close, but I’m in really big trouble! Well, not trouble per say but, it’s just that, well, it’s my niece’s birthday tomorrow, I still haven’t gotten her anything and I don’t even have any idea of what it should be!”

Rosalind put her hand to her chin and considered it for a moment.

“Does she like dolls?”

“I’m not sure if I know of a little girl who doesn’t like dolls,” the woman said thoughtfully.

“I can think of a few,” Rosalind replied with a grin, “Come here, I’ll show you our stock. We have the best doll selection in Puget Sound, dare I say the entire Pacific Northwest.”

The woman was indecisive and took a lot of time picking between three very similar looking dolls from the same manufacturer, and yet Rosalind didn’t lose a lick of patience. She even deeply considered all the pros and cons when it came time to be a tie breaker.

She walked her up to the checkout counter where Grelle was lazily leaned back in her chair reading a fashion magazine. Even though she protested how plain it was, she still wore the simple shop dress and apron that Rosalind had insisted on. It was best for business if they matched, professionalism was key. Despite being indoors she wore a small hat off-center with an opaque veil that covered her missing eye along with her long dark brown hair. 

“Oh thank God you’re finally done over there, and we can close up,” she said leaning forward. Ros elbowed her in the ribs producing a light oof. “Sorry, I’m glad you’ve chosen us for your toy shopping needs.” Grelle’s eyes fell on the doll the woman was carrying. “Ah, a doll, I always loved dolls. Something about pretending to be a mommy as a little girl always made me so happy. I’m sure you’re going to make a little girl very happy,” she said while processing the transaction before asking: “Did you want that gift wrapped?”

“Oh yes please, I’ll tell you I’m terrible with wrapping paper,” the woman said. Grelle giggled amiably and started in on the process of wrapping it up. She noticed the woman staring at the way Grelle had to wrap it with only one arm.

“Camping trip a few years back, there was a bear attack,” Grelle said, her usual cover story. 

“She saved me!” Ros added, as she always did. She just wanted people to know how great Grelle was.

“What a cool big sister! You remind me so much of my own!” the woman said with admiration in her eyes at Grelle’s immense feats of courage.

“She’s my mother, actually,” Ros corrected. She usually operated on the lie that they were sisters nowadays, but sometimes she was overtaken with a deep sadness at having to deny her mother in front of everyone. It made her feel good to tell people what an awesome mom she had.

“Aw, well someday I hope I can be half the mom that you are Misses...?”

“Jacklyn Whitechapel,” Grelle said with a kind, if sly, smile.

After the woman left they finished closing up the shop, locking everything away, and lowering all the curtains. They made their way to their apartments upstairs.

Grelle made Grelled Cheese Sandwiches for dinner. Her cooking had significantly improved over time. Getting Rosalind proper nutrition was something that was really important to her and as such put tons of effort into. These sandwiches were great, they had just the right amount of love.

Rosalind asked Grelle if she wanted to play a game of cards, but she reminded her that they’d be having friends over for their poker night tomorrow and that she didn’t intend to lose to Ros two nights in a row. Even though it was getting late Rosalind still stayed up for hours reading the latest novel she had bought at that bookstore downtown. Eventually Grelle had to do her duty as a mother and urge Ros to get some sleep.

Ros went off to her own bed, in her own room. It was neatly decorated and homey. Perhaps a little over decorated at this point. She’d need to go through and cut out some of the things she didn’t need anymore.

She brushed out her hair and washed her face clean of make up in the basin on her vanity. She took out her glass eye and plopped it into a fresh glass of water. She donned a cozy nightgown before crawling into bed.

She had little trouble falling asleep, and even less staying asleep. The nightmares were still there and they always would be. But they were better, definitely better. 

Definitely better.


	11. She Remains An Englishman

Woe to the mother who outlives her child, for she lives out the most wretched life of any of God’s creatures. Truly, there is nothing under the sun that is more worthy of pity.

Grelle checked the small book in her hand, like she did every time she came to the hospital. Her eye traced down the line of names and dates, until she saw one that made her stop. If her heart still beat it would have skipped.

There it was, the line she knew would always be there one day.

> Rosalind Whitechapel - 4th of March, 1959, 8:31:09pm

She pressed the little round black button that called the elevator to the sound of a deep manual click, but the elevator didn’t arrive, at least not in time for her. It might have only been a few moments or it might have been a few hours but Grelle simply didn’t have the patience. She took off at a brisk jog that turned into a cacophony of high heels clattering against the linoleum tile. 

Up a flight of stairs and then up another. Then into a hallway, rooms and rooms and rooms and a nurse.

“You’re the…” the nurse started, it was one she didn’t recognize. She’d been there every day, she’d gotten used to the regular rotation of nurses but this one was new.

“Granddaughter, yes,” Grelle lied. Her other family had come when she had been moved to hospice, but the old girl was as tough as ever, and seemingly refused to die in a timely manner. So all her children, and grandchildren had left to return to their lives, leaving Grelle as the only one at her bedside each day. Of course many who lived close by would still visit, she was loved. But the love of children only went so far. It was how it should be, Rosalind had given them love so that they themselves could live their lives just as Grelle had for Ros.

She entered the room and took in her daughter. She was old, and dying. She’d seen plenty of old dying women in her line of work. This was no different. No more difficult.

She sat down by her bed and held her hand. She was asleep. Or rather in the twilight space between life and death. She wondered if she might wake up to say anything in her final moments or if her last words would be the ones from last night where she had asked for a fruit cup. 

Grelle had been in this business long enough to know that culture set up unrealistic standards for dignity in death. Most people live like people, and most people die like people. It’s one of the most human things, next to love. 

She wondered if she should feel bad for being bored. She didn’t just wonder, she  _ did _ feel bad. She felt like she ought to be wrenched, like she ought to work her brain overtime to take in every second of these last moments. But instead she found herself reaching for the Vogue in her purse.

She sat there with her all day, listening to her ragged breathing. Counting down the end of her daughter’s life. It didn’t matter if she didn’t get to say a proper goodbye, very few people did, they would all be together in the end.

The hours passed until the time came. She put down the magazine and tousled her hair. She never did wake up. With any luck her last dream wasn’t a nightmare.

Grelle picked up the cane sitting by her bedside and revealed its true nature, tenderly pressing the tip of the American Reaper’s Scythe into her chest.

Cinematic Record spouted out of her like a geyser.

Grelle leaned back watching it.

She had never seen Ciel, only heard stories, and even then only rarely. Ros was loath to talk about her life in England, even up until the end. She had been such an ordinary child, they both had been. Happy when playing, crying when she was sad, she loved cookies and was afraid of the dark.

Rosalind’s life was scary at first. It was terrifying. She had been through things that no one should ever have to be through and even worse. Things that shook Grelle to her bones, and now she had to see them for herself, rather than just hear about them. Worse still, after that Rosalind had found herself living a life she had no fundamental interest in living. Living a life that froze her in a perpetual loop of isolation and self hatred.

But even though things were dark and scary and awful at first, there were years upon years upon years that weren’t. It was almost astounding the sheer volume of pleasant memories that Grelle was reliving as they spilled out of Ros. They went on and on and on. She had done things, and gone places, and been a person that it seemed like the little kid who was in so much pain then could never even imagine. The dark past was never forgotten, but weighed against the happy moments of Ros’ life it barely even registered on the scale.

There was her wedding of course, the adoptions of her children. But there were simpler times too that made Grelle smile. Their trip back to New York, baseball games, poker nights, the many times she went cherry picking with her future spouse, working in the toyshop. As time went on there were things that Grelle hadn’t been there for. Things that, as a mother, she had been obliged to step back and let Ros figure out on her own. 

Of course not everything was ever peachy, but it was human. It was the life of a normal person. The normal woman that Rosalind deserved to be. One could say something about Rosalind that few could ever claim: she lived a good life. One that was worth living.

And Grelle loved her daughter forever and always.

With the soul reaped she walked out of that room. She left the Scythe there, it served no purpose to her anymore. She wondered if she ought to stay for the service. She was a part of Rosalind’s family, but not a big one, and certainly a mysterious figure to them. The quirky and aloof aunt Jacklyn who never seemed to age.

She looked into her purse. She should have more than enough to buy a one-way ticket to London.

So strange that she’d be leaving this place in the skies. So strange to leave the ground in a metal tube and soar above the American prairies that once could only be forded by the steam engine. Then across the Atlantic, once the domain of ocean liners. The Airplane had superseded them both. So strange that flying too became boring to Grelle. She cracked open  _ The People of the Abyss _ for what must have been the fifth time in her life. It wasn’t exactly light reading, but she wanted to recall London as she knew it before those memories were blasted away by its contemporary reality.

As she got off the plane she was briefly overtaken by a hysteria in which she considered buying a ticket to Newcastle, visiting her old childhood stomping grounds. She neatly disposed of that notion with deadly efficiency.

Instead she made her way to London Dispatch to turn herself in, or whatever, she didn’t have much else to do. Her London was monumentally different from the one she saw before her on these once familiar streets. There wasn’t much here for her, but there might be something there.

She walked down the stark white halls, heels clicking against the hard floors. She couldn’t exactly see where she was going, but she knew the route to William’s office by heart even after all this time. Reapers that saw her made little confused noises and moved out of her way to let her through. She didn’t know if any of them were anyone she would have known, she couldn’t see them properly as it stood.

She threw open the door to William’s office with a loud bang and she saw the fuzzy occupant of the chair sitting at the desk jump up startled.

“Did you miss me?” she sang, not skipping a beat.

“Um, I have no idea who you are ma’am,” came a squeaky feminine voice from across the room. Grelle deflated. She was so sure this was his office, maybe she hadn’t kept the path in her heart.

“Sincerest apologies, would you happen to know where the offices of one William T. Spears are?” Grelle said. They fiddled with something on their face.

“Uh, Director Spears’ office is on the top floor ma’am. It’s kind of hard to miss actually.”

“Oh, well thank you very much.” And with that Grelle jogged off to the stairwell.

“Director?” she shouted when she slammed open the door to William’s real office. She’d even leaned up close to read the large nameplate on the door, to make sure this time.

This figure didn’t jump at the noise, as far as Grelle could tell he didn’t even look up from his typewriter.

“Sutcliff,” he said. Grelle began weeping at the sound of his voice. It was a divine sound. She walked over to his desk, his shape ever so slowly becoming slightly more defined. “Did you find whatever it was that you were looking for?”

“No,” she answered in between sobs. This was not how she had imagined their reunion going. She had always pictured having the upper hand and being in control when they met again, she never thought she’d be so snotty. It was like all the feelings from her daughter’s passing were finally breaking down the dam she didn’t know she built. “But I found so much more, William.”

“I can certainly imagine.”

“I wouldn’t know what it is that men can know.”

“And to answer your question, yes I am the acting Director of the London Dispatch,” he said before finishing up with whatever it was he had been typing out and placing it on a neat little pile of other stacked papers. He proceeded to open a drawer in his desk, reach deep inside to grab a few items, then stand up to walk around to the side she was on. He handed her a tissue and stood there for a moment sizing her up before saying: “So, you’re back. Why?”

“I’m um… here to turn myself in I suppose. I’ve fulfilled my purpose on Earth, I think. Really, I just wanted to see you,” she answered dabbing at her snotty face with tissue. Eventually it was soaked through and she tried and failed to throw it into a trash can. Or rubbish bin, she’d need to get repatriated. 

“Well, you can hardly do that without glasses, here,” he said in his typical emotionless monotone, handing her a pair of red glasses with a long dark chain. He kept them.

She put them on and she felt dizzy for a moment as the world snapped into focus for the first time in forever. She took in her William, he was handsome as ever. Her glasses weren’t the only thing he kept. He was looking very smart in a modern black suit, there was a single pop of red in his outfit in the form of a lacy pocket square. It made her smile even if her tears were still flowing.

“Wait, you’re taking me back? Why? Shouldn’t I be flogged for eternity or fed to demons or something?”

“Technically there’s no guidelines for what should be done with a defecting reaper that willingly returns. It’s never happened in our history. So as the Director of London Dispatch the responsibility of your discipline falls to me. I can think of no punishment harsher than your reinstatement.”

“You know me too well,” she said. 

“Of course we’ll need to get you a new arm, and a new eye.”

“A new arm sure, but I think I’ll keep the eye as it is,” she said. It meant too much to get rid of. “I will want to dye my hair back, though, if you’re free later,”

“Suit yourself, Sutcliff,” he said, not answering her proposition which she knew meant yes. He held out a small pair of pruning scissors, the twin to the pair she had lost in America. She looked at his face to see the glint of a smirk. “Now get to work.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading, everyone. Writing this has been an absolute joy and I'm going to be more than a little sad leave it behind.
> 
> If I've left you craving more, feel free to peruse some of my other stuff, specifically [Hand Me Down My Suit And Tie](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25030375/chapters/60615826) which is a fic with a similar premise and similar themes that I put on hiatus in order write this. I will be getting back to it soon now.
> 
> Again, I can't stress how humbled I feel that people have read and enjoyed my work, thank you so much for reading.


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